


our truth is interred with our bones

by maskedlady



Series: Nyarna [1]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, It happens, and an absolute idealization of a library, and i mean that in the most gender neutral sense of the word, but only if you interpret canon with the unreliable narrator caveat, but then we all know how vanimeldë's reign ended, elves are also trash, even if it was not exactly true, i mean there's some hopefulness in the middle, implied adultery but everyone involved is okay with that, in this case because people who did not want to be executed wrote what the king wanted, includes my personal headcanons and also other people's headcanons, it also averts cousin incest later which is something númenor was canonically not okay with, men are trash, mostly as a plot device to kill people who need to die because of plot reasons, pretty tragic sorry, the sea makes several appearances, the timeline is probably more than a little messed up, they do not make an appearance - Freeform, trash elves are referenced
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:00:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28088895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maskedlady/pseuds/maskedlady
Summary: Vanimeldë did not change the world.Vanimeldë never had absolute power, not if she really thought about it, but that was one thought she did not care to chase; the paths it led down were dark. Vanimeldë did not even have the legacy she deserved, for even in her life her deeds were unknown, and after her death they were forgotten.Vanimeldë the beautiful, they called her, Vanimeldë the beloved, Vanimeldë who loved music and dance and gave no heed to ruling. There were songs about her skills in the arts. There were also songs warning girls to beware of suitors, to beware of who they married, new ballads of usurpers passed off as traditional barbarian tales, and those would stay even when memory of who wrote them did not.Vanimeldë changed the world, but the world never knew it.
Relationships: Herucalmo/Tar-Vanimeldë, Tar-Alcarin & Tar-Vanimeldë, Tar-Telemmaitë & Tar-Vanimeldë, Tar-Telemmaitë/Tar-Telemmaitë's wife, Tar-Vanimeldë & Original Characters, Tar-Vanimeldë/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Nyarna [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2071905
Comments: 6
Kudos: 2
Collections: Tolkien Secret Santa, Tolkien Secret Santa 2020





	1. Eäriel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [2Nienna2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/2Nienna2/gifts).



> Inspired by many things, including some tumblr headcanons, the unreliability of historical accounts, my unhappiness with Tolkien's portrayal of Vanimeldë. I can provide family trees if the genealogy grows too confusing at any point.  
> Title inspired by Antonius' speech in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. The correct quote would be "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones." That speech has been haunting me, it's beautiful, please go read it. I can provide commentary on roman styles of oratory.  
> There are translation notes at the end of most chapters.  
> No characters are canonical except the Rulers of Númenor and Herucalmo.

They said when she was born, her mother looked at her and laughed, and when her father came to her rooms she did not give her husband his daughter to hold, but held the child up and said, _behold your queen_. That her father, tears in his eyes, smiled and knelt and kissed his wife and kissed his daughter still in her arms and said, _give her a name worthy of a queen_.

 _Movingly lovely_ , her mother said. _Her beauty will change hearts and her voice will change minds_.

Then she died.

Newly-born, newly-named, newly-orphaned, Vanimeldë started crying.

It was not giving birth that killed her, the medics said, though it was hardly necessary. They’d known for years. Eäriel had been sick: her heart stuttered and stumbled, more and more so the longer her years stretched, though they were not yet long at all when she died.

Telemmaitë had a gutted look in his eyes when he gazed at her, and she kissed him to make it go away. _I want a daughter to remember me_ , she told him.

 _I will remember you always_ , he said, but also _anything you want, my queen_.

She wanted—

“A daughter,” she said firmly, because it was the only thing she knew she could have.

—to live long as was her birthright; to see the shores of Middle-Earth and the lands where the silver Telemmaitë covered her in was bloodily born; to know herself strong and young and happy without the shadow of a sword forever hanging over her; a crown to be set on her head and a throne to exercise her will from; she wanted to be queen.

—a daughter, to do everything she could not.

They wed in autumn, against all customs. Eäriel insisted upon it. _Summer is life’s fill, and spring its beginning_ , she said to Telemmaitë. _But you are taking a dying bride, and in waning too there is glory: autumn is a dead world’s last flame_.

 _You are taking a dying bride and I will not let you forget it_. Eäriel knew of her affliction from a young age, and unable to escape it she found pride in it. She made it a part of herself. Telemmaitë at first loved her for that: the feeling of a thing soon to be gone, living half in the past already; and she knew it.

 _Behold your queen_. To her husband she gave her love. To her child she gave her dark skin and dark moods, a gift for music and drama, and all the ambition she could never have lived long enough to see realized.

She wrote frantically, every moment she could spare from court and Telemmaitë and her life. Her prose was not as good as her poetry, her speeches not as good as her songs, but she did not have time to make it pretty, to make it clean. No; she did not wish to. She wanted everything she had suffered and everything she had wanted and never had to survive her, to teach where she could not, to realize her dreams when she was gone.

_O Valar, O Eru, if you have for your Secondborn a shred of the mercy you showed your first children, do not let my child be affected as I am._

She writes and writes and hides her work. From everyone but him.

 _What do you write, my love?_ he asks her one night, lying in her bed as she sits at her table with a candle dangerously close to her hair.

 _It’s a secret_ says Eäriel, and lets the book snap closed, and turns. _Telemmaitë, when I die—_

His look changes instantly, and as much as she hates the grief in his eyes—looking at her as though he already sees her corpse—this must be done. Telemmaitë says, _Do not speak of it, Eäriel, I entreat you_.

 _My love_ , she whispers tenderly, and blows out the flame. In the dark, she can continue. _We know it will happen. When I die give my books to my daughter; show them to no one else_.

 _Anything you want, my queen_ , he murmurs, and though the grief is still in his voice she smiles, because maybe for her this is enough. He loves her enough.

She is a woman of many contradictions, Eäriel. She loves to remind others of her death but hates them to remind her of it, and searches for life in life-threatening dangers. She steals snatches of it standing over precipices, in the sea swimming far enough that her limbs almost start to fail her, escaping her very real death in the possibility of ones she would never consider.

When she dies she does it quietly. She looks in the eyes of her daughter and she is content, because it was never enough, but it will be.


	2. Vanimeldë

They told her that her mother died looking at her and smiling, and with her last breath she named her Queen. Vanimeldë does not remember. Of course she doesn’t, her father says once, when she complains of it after he tells her the tale for the hundredth time; she could not remember anything so small.

“I ought to remember my mother,” Vanimeldë says, when she is seven and thinks it appropriate to speak like the books on Elven philosophy she found in the library, though she does not yet understand them. “I ought to know her voice.”

Her father looks grave but says nothing.

When she is four her father remarries. “ _And in all ways unlike Míriel_ ,” Vanimeldë’s nurse mutters under her breath, but when Vanimeldë tugs on her sleeve and asks for an explanation the girl shushes her with a smile and a cherry pastry. Only when she is older will Vanimeldë understand, and then she'll think with grim amusement that the descendants of Elros make for fine Noldor indeed.

But in truth, the circumstances of Telemmaitë’s remarriage are little like Finwë’s. Neither he nor his new wife—beautiful Almanís, who, rumour has it, keeps her lover through her marriage—wish to wed; it is Tar-Ancalimon who insists upon it, that Telemmaitë must have an heir.

 _My daughter is my heir_ , her father says in rage, and only under threat of banishment does he finally comply.

They are all surprised when her brother is born only a year later. (But then if Almanís kept her lover…)

“His name is Lengweär,” Almanís says, and Vanimeldë knows her father let his wife name the child once again.

Lengweär’s fist closes around the finger she waves in front of him with surprising strength. His face is bright and attentive and not at all alike her own.

“He’s lovely,” she says, and her stepmother’s eyes light up with grateful joy.

The rumours have always been there, but they grow louder and louder until her father and her grandfather can no longer speak without starting to scream, until the air grows so brittle Vanimeldë learns to walk quietly, so afraid is she of breaking the silence; until Almanís deems it wiser to leave the capital and moves them all to Rómenna.

Rómenna is beautiful. There are ships in the harbour, more than Vanimeldë can count; great wooden ships, and people on deck speaking in tongues that are neither Sindarin nor Adûnaic. The air smells different than in Armenelos; the sounds are different. There is surprisingly less shouting. There are seagulls closer to the coast, and there is the ever-present wind—wind alone, and wind-in-the-trees, and wind in the flowers—and there are flowers everywehere! And not the tame golden-silver-bright flowers in the gardens of Armenelos; but wild bushes on the side of the winding streets, green slipping through the cracks in the stone that paves the road, small supple branches with clusters of slender leaves, unassuming at first glance but gilding the edges of her sight always, engentling the stone and cobbles and sharp calls of birds. Sea-herbs, Almanís calls them, and sea-lilies that she points out, white and swaying in the breeze. _Don’t pick them_ , she admonishes them, and Vanimeldë reaches back down to snatch away the hands of little Lengweär.

And of course there’s the sea. The sea, ever-present; the sea, that dominates sounds and scents and her sight. The sea: blue, and cold and salt, and everywhere. Water that stretches as far as the eye can see; waves crested in foam, teasing at the shore. Black-streaked white sand that turns grey and glassy when wet and slips through her fingers and into her hair and coats her skin in fine layers of dust. Water to wash it away and leave it covered in white salt. And salt! Salt on her tongue always, salt in the air, salt in the sweet pastries they sell on the stands that line the seafront. And the sea calls to her, whispers in her ears and reaches out with tendrils of sound to draw her back. Its voice catches in her ears and tangles in her hair as its sight fills her eyes even when she turns away.

Vanimeldë loves it.

It’s a gloomy, cloud-coated day when Vanimeldë slips down to the shore to find the sea and finds so much more.

The girl is sitting on the ledge of the street that lines the shore, her legs dangling over the rocks underneath. She’s perfectly still, staring out over the waves, and does not notice Vanimeldë approaching until she sits down beside her. Even then she only turns her head slowly and stares at her.

Vanimeldë does not look away.

The girl quirks a quick smile and looks back to the sea.

The next day she’s there again. (Or still there?) Vanimeldë speaks this time. “What are you looking for?” she asks.

“Ships,” the girl said. “Ships in a storm.”

Vanimeldë looks up dubiously. The skies are still overcast, but they haven’t broken yet. “There’s no storm.”

“And no ships.”

That is a lie—from where she’s sitting Vanimeldë can see several ships at anchor—but then maybe the girl meant no ships in the sea. Of course, she thinks with the superiority of someone who’s been learning about ships for maybe half a year, of course there are no ships at sea: a storm’s coming.

She does not say any of this. Instead she asks, “Do you like the sea?”

The girl doesn’t turn and doesn’t move, but something in her changes, stiffens. “My parents loved it,” she says evenly.

Vanimeldë cocks her head to the side. She has been living in court for seven years, and as dissimulations go this is not a very clever one. “But do _you_ like it?”

“They died in it,” says the girl. And Vanimeldë has been living in court for seven years, but they’re not in court now, and she puts an arm around the girl’s shoulders and does not ask again.

When they leave for Armenelos again, Nimruphêr and her sister come back with them.

Nimruphêr is the daughter of the daughter of the sister of the wife of Vanimeldë’s mother’s father’s brother. Nimruphêr recites it with a distant look in her eyes, like she memorized it automatically. Just thinking of it makes Vanimeldë’s head spin, and she settles for remembering the two details she deems most important: they are not related, and they share a cousin, the son of Vanimeldë’s great-uncle and Nimruphêr’s great-aunt.

(There is another, rather obvious, piece of information she could glean from Nimruphêr’s family-tree recitation, but she does not think it relevant for a long time.)

The cousin’s name is Niluzîr. Vanimeldë remembers him, vaguely, as a tall, lean, sea-weathered man who brought her gifts and stories from his journeys in Middle-Earth. He is very kind and considerate, Nimruphêr agrees, and it was generous of him to take them in after their parents died. When Vanimeldë points out that, as their only surviving relative, it seems the least he could do, Nimruphêr gets that strange expression again, but it’s gone in an instant and she immediately changes the subject.

Nimruphêr is seven when they meet, a year younger than Vanimeldë herself, and her sister is even younger. Rôthinzil, Nimruphêr introduces her: a little girl who clings to her sister’s hand and looks up at Vanimeldë with great fearful eyes. Vanimeldë kneels to look the child in her eyes, glad to be the taller one for once, and smiles: Rôthinzil warily smiles back, round-cheeked and close-lipped. She will be beautiful, Vanimeldë can tell with a glance, remarkably so, and that, coupled with her shyness, will do her well in court.

Nimruphêr, however, is more interesting.

“You could adopt Quenya names,” Vanimeldë suggests once as they walk down the beach—her father called them back to Armenelos, and Vanimeldë spends the remainder of her days in Rómenna as close to the sea as possible. “Most aristocratic families favour them.”

She weaves a question into her words, but Nimruphêr either doesn’t notice or chooses not to reply; in the four years Vanimeldë has known her, it has happened often enough to become interesting, though she tries to ignore it. Instead Nimruphêr shakes her head. “I would prefer not,” she says mildly.

“It might ease your… introduction.”

“It is a question of politics, then,” Nimruphêr says, pensive. They are speaking Sindarin, and her Sindarin is still very formal. Unlike most nobles, she only started learning it when she was fostered by Niluzîr—which is another interesting peculiarity—so she only has three years of practice. She does not struggle with it, though, not like her sister, there is only a certain… sharpness to her words.

“You should blend them together more,” she says abruptly, and when Nimruphêr looks at her, startled, she realizes she lost herself in her thoughts again. “In Sindarin. Your pronunciation is very sharp, too sharp. You should let your words slip into each other, like a song.”

“I can’t sing,” says Nimruphêr, amusement slipping into her voice.

“I know,” Vanimeldë says. “You’re hopeless with music.”

“If it’s music you want you should ask Rôthinzil! She’s almost as good as you are. _I_ can follow your thoughts.”

“But you do not always answer them,” Vanimeldë retorts, matching her both in tone and register. Nimruphêr, predictably, does not answer, but this time she smiles. “Do you prefer Sindarin to Adûnaic?” she asks.

“It isn’t a question of what I prefer,” Vanimeldë says. They’ve reached the rocks; she gathers the folds of her dress in her arms—blue linen, fit for summer and for the sea; even if it gets ruined she will never need it again—and hauls herself up onto a boulder she knows to be less sharp than the others. Nimruphêr follows her with some wariness and more care for her clothes. “Words that mean the same sound very different. Sometimes one sound fits better, sometimes the other.”

“And in song it is always the Sinda?”

“Not at all! There are beautiful songs in Adûnaic.”

“You should write more,” Nimruphêr suggests. “You would be able to reach more people.”

Vanimeldë turns to her. The sun is setting, tinging her pale skin in gold and red, and there is a curious look in her eyes.

“That would probably be considered improper,” she says, caught off guard.

Nimruphêr looks away, shaking her head. “I do not think it would,” she says, but there is a note of disappointment in her voice. “Politics!”

They are silent for a while, and Vanimeldë listens to the sea’s voice, fashioning it into whispers and words and letting her thoughts wander along its waves.

“Do you know,” she says eventually, thoughtful, “Niluzîr told me a story once, of when he went to Middle-Earth for the first time.”

Nimruphêr tilts her head, listening.

“The lesser Men of that land have a myth, of a man who fell in love with the Moon—a goddess, in their religion. His name was then changed to moon-lover. So then when they knew the meaning of Niluzîr’s name, they held him in great esteem—because his name was the same as that of their great hero.”

Nimruphêr laughs, startlingly. “Thou art wily!” she says—the archaism, Vanimeldë thinks, is intentional this time—“I had not realized you were still thinking of that part of our conversation. And I thought I had done a good job of distracting you!”

 _You had._ “You can’t fool me,” she says instead.

“But I see your meaning,” Nimruphêr says, suddenly serious again. “Names have power. All the more we should not change them as it suits us!”

“But the _meaning_ is the important part.” Vanimeldë kicks her heels against the rock. “And it stays the same! It's only the sound that changes.”

“Perhaps I like the sound of my name.”

“The courtiers won’t,” Vanimeldë warns.

“So it _is_ a question of politics.”

“Not... necessarily.”

“Everything is a question of politics,” says Nimruphêr, her tone gentler, and Vanimeldë angrily turns away.

“I am not an Elf, Vanimeldë,” she adds after a while, soft and low. “Clearly my parents did not mean to make me an Elf.”

“They did name you _Elf-maiden_ ,” Vanimeldë can't help but point out.

“In the language of Men.”

Vanimeldë dismisses that with a wave of her hand. Nimruphêr kicks up water in her face, then jumps down from the rock and takes off, her heels kicking up sand and foam.

“Fiend!” Vanimeldë cries before following suit, and Nimruphêr’s laughter echoes in the fading light.

Two months later, she is introduced to the court of Armenelos as Eledhwen Vorondiel.

When she is fourteen her father summons her. Vanimeldë meets with her father often; a royal summons is unusual, and unexpected, and makes her nervous even though she probably—she thinks—has nothing to worry about.

That is what she tells Nimruphêr, who does not appear to be reassured.

“ _Melda_ ,” he calls her when she steps into the rooms she thinks of as her mother’s—her father lives in them but he never shared them with Almanís. Her father is the only person who can always hear her coming even without seeing her: now he’s sitting at her mother’s desk, staring at the coffer that lies in front of him.

“Father,” she says, stopping next to him and looking over his shoulder curiously. It’s a simple carved wooden box, but the wood is fine and the carvings intricate. The keyhole is dark, oxydated, as though it hasn’t been touched in a long time.

Her father lifts the box and hands it to her; it is heavier than she expected. “This was your mother’s,” he says, finally looking at her. “It was her wish that you should receive it.”

Vanimeldë nods speechlessly.

“She—suspected, already, that she would not meet you long. She wrote you. Those,” he nods at the box, “are her diaries.”

Suddenly, its weight acquires a new meaning. “Yes,” Vanimeldë manages to choke out, and turns to leave.

“Vanimeldë,” her father calls after her, and she turns, already half out the door in her hurry, to see him smiling, sad and knowing. “The key,” he says, and crosses the room to press it into her palm.

“ _Hantantye_ ,” Vanimeldë whispers formally, and then she is gone. If her father sees her tears he does not call after her; if he calls she does not hear, already far along the palace’s winding corridors, footfalls silent on the marble floors and tears silent on her cheeks.

She does not open her box for another month; it sits on a shelf in her rooms, the key hanging around her neck. Nimruphêr casts curious looks to both but knows better than to ask; no one else seems to notice the change as Vanimeldë walks and talks and sings and tries to corral her courage.

It is not that she doesn’t _want_ to know.

It is not that she doesn’t miss her mother. She misses her with an ache that borders on physical pain; she misses her unreasonably, for someone she’s never met. But she doesn’t _know_ her. The closest thing to a mother she can think of is Almanís, watching her play with Lengweär, but _her_ mother…

Her mother is a phantom pain in her chest, the haunted look in her father's eyes that he does not always manage to hide when she turns and catches him looking at her.

So every night she casts a guilty look to the shelf and thinks, _tomorrow_.

After reading through every page and scrap of paper she finds in the box—after finally, finally, one night she looks at it and thinks _that’s enough_ —Vanimeldë comes to the conclusion that she is her mother.

Correction: that her mother is a sharper, darker, fierier version of herself. Vanimeldë has her ambition and her beauty and her gift for the arts, but everything feels duller somehow: an apprentice painter’s pencil sketch of a great masterpiece. Eäriel is _more_ ; she writes like the world is on fire, she writes like she’s pouring the page too full of words in the hope that they’ll overflow and she’ll drown in them, and her writing reads like she’s trying to push through paper and ink and back into the world.

She was just so much more _alive_.

How is that possible? Her mother was born already on her way to death. All who will tell Vanimeldë of her speak of an ephemeral being, her beauty pale and dark and delicate, a woman made half a ghost by the knowledge of her life’s transience. In her writing Eäriel is keenly aware of her death, but all the more alive for it, blazing like a sunset sky.

 _My mother_ , Vanimeldë thinks, _could make people think what she wanted them to think._

_My mother was young and hungry and terrified._

_My mother wanted me to be queen._

_My mother wanted me to be like her, better than her, what she should’ve been._

_Mother_ , she thinks, _as you would._

“Rhetoric,” she says, “politics, theory of economy, tactic and strategy, ancient and recent history, and philosophy, and Elven and Mannish lore.”

Her father and her stepmother just stare at her, speechless.

“Music and dance,” she adds belatedly.

They’re still silent.

“Literature? Mathematics?” she continues in increasingly desperate tones. What _is_ she supposed to say to make the others acceptable—

“Vanimeldë,” her father interrupts her gently, but his alarm is plain in both his voice and his face, “ _all_ of those?”

Vanimeldë falls silent, stunned. “Not that you can’t,” Telemmaitë hastens to add—he does not deny his daughter, his beautiful and capable and intelligent daughter, anything, ever—“but you don’t think it might be a bit... heavy? That’s a lot of subjects to study at once.”

“But I’ve already been studying half of them,” she counters, quickly recovering, “it would be a shame to drop them, and the others I think are important.” She makes a gamble and raises her chin proudly. “Things I should know. As your heir.”

Behind her, she can hear Nimruphêr’s sharp intake of breath.

As her father’s eldest—and perhaps only, though she can’t say that, and no one else is allowed to say it, either—child, Vanimeldë is directly in line for the throne. Her father and her stepmother both agree on that. _I did not want this life for myself_ , Vanimeldë overheard her say to her father, once they’d grown close enough that they talked outside of the formalities of court, _and I do not want it for my son._ If Almanís has ambitions, they lie outside of the crown, and Lengweär is still too young to express any of his own. And Vanimeldë herself, now, wants it more than ever before.

The King, however, would not see her on his throne. That makes speaking it—

—dangerous.

But her father’s eyes flash, and Vanimeldë knows he, too, is thinking of the King’s will, and defiance of it. And before he opens his mouth to speak, she knows she’s won.

“Vanimeldë, a word,” Almanís calls to her afterwards, and Vanimeldë follows her into the garden, her elation swiftly freezing into dread—not of Almanís herself, only of what the summons means. Her anxiety deepens as they walk in silence. _Will she take it away?_ asks a voice in her head, and no matter how she tries to bury it it echoes in every step she takes and only quietens once Almanís stops and turns to look at her.

“You’ve read your mother’s writings,” she says. It is not a question. “You know about them,” Vanimeldë counters, trusting Almanís to pick up on her own question.

“I found the box in your father’s rooms—he told me what it contained,” her stepmother says. “I was only looking to ask him for—something, I can’t recall what now…”

 _You don’t have to offer justifications_ , Vanimeldë wants to say—Almanís is her father’s wife in nothing but name and his friend in all other things, and Vanimeldë considers her as such—but she is already speaking again. “I knew Eäriel,” she says.

This time it’s surprise closing up her throat, keeping her voice trapped.

“Not well, I’m afraid,” Almanís continues, “but I was her friend, as close to her as she would allow anyone, except maybe your father. She had a fire burning in her.”

“You knew her better than most,” Vanimeldë manages.

Almanís smiles. “You have her fire,” she says. “Do you know what fire is, Vanimeldë?”

Vanimeldë shakes her head.

“No one does. All we know is what it does. Fire is a wily thing: you must give it just enough to keep yourself warm, but too much and it will devour you. Tend your fire, Vanimeldë; keep it alive. It will serve you well. But remember that you are not the fire. Do not give it your life.”

Vanimeldë nods speechlessly.

“Your friend will be wondering about you,” Almanís says, and Vanimeldë knows the dismissal for what it is.

She bows and sprints away. Lithe and light and utterly soundless.

Nimruphêr loves letters. Nimruphêr loves languages. Nimruphêr loves to argue about anything and everything, from the specifics of the discrepancies of Elven history to the specifics of the nuances of a single Quenya root, to the minutiae of rhetoric and the precise shade of meaning any word will convey based on its sound and inflection and the way it ties into the rest of the sentence, and Nimruphêr is qualified for it, Nimruphêr has been studying all of it for seven decades, with the King’s own private tutors and then the best teachers the University could offer her, Nimruphêr went well and beyond that and read all the books on the subject she could find in the library and then all the books one couldn’t find in the library and Nimruphêr is aware of her arrogance in presuming herself more knowledgeable than scholars with a century’s study over her but Nimruphêr _knows what she is talking about_ —

“—and they will not _listen_ to me,” Nimruphêr cries angrily. Though perhaps that is too mild a word for it; she’s pacing back and forth in front of the window, in and out of the light cast by Vanimeldë’s lamp, and the play of shadows highlights the cutting gestures of her hands, and the way her eyes refract the light makes her look fell and fey as a Noldo Elf.

She’s fuming.

Vanimeldë, who left off philosophy after a year, and lore after five, and history when with twenty years of thorough learning she felt like no further study would serve her in ruling, now with half a century’s distance from any of it, listens to her friend rage about the details of research on a subject she has no familiarity with aware that she doesn’t know what Nimruphêr is talking about.

She can understand the frustration, though.

“You know I could help with that,” she offers, even though she knows it’s the wrong thing to say. And indeed Nimruphêr immediately rounds on her.

“No! Already I was only admitted because of your intervention—”

“That’s not true.”

It is true, but it _shouldn’t_ be true.

“It is, they hate me because they think I shouldn’t even be there, and they are right, I _shouldn’t_ be there—”

“It would be their loss not to have you. Half of your publications have their name on it, too.” _Nimruphêr Eledhwen, Member of the Royal University of Armenelos_ , in beautiful script on a dozen books praised as some of the best on linguistics and rhetoric. The University, Vanimeldë knows, reaps a tidy profit from them. Bunch of ingrates.

Nimruphêr cuts her short with a gesture. “It doesn’t matter now, not any longer. The only reason I haven’t been thrown out is your patronage.” She slumps against the wall and lets herself slide down to the floor. “All my work, ruined.”

“Will you throw something at me if I put forth a thought experiement on what would happen if, entirely theoretically, you were to recant?”

Nimruphêr looks up. “Recant _what_?”

Vanimeldë waves her hand vaguely through the air. “Whichever revolutionary and borderline blasphemous opinion of yours it was that caused this… extreme disagreement you’ve been telling me about.”

“That’s the point. It isn’t _one_. It’s nearly every single thing I ever said about anything—they all lead here. Unless I deny everything I ever said I believed in…” She crosses her arms. “Also, I don’t want to.”

“I thought you were a sophist,” Vanimeldë observes, raising an eyebrow.

“I believe in the value of argumentation for its own sake and the power of speech,” Nimruphêr says haughtily. “I do have opinions I’m not willing to deny.”

Vanimeldë lays her head on her arms, reaching down with one hand to brush her fingers against the strings of the harp lying by her bed. To think that of all the things she studied, she would enjoy this the most—but music _is_ her passion.

At least until—well, her grandfather’s opinions are what they are and their result is that Vanimeldë’s place in court is as little more than a pretty talking sculpture, but her father promised her he’ll give her a position in court when he ascends to the throne. A new start, in every sense.

“Maybe that’s what you need,” she says thoughfully.

“I can’t read your mind, Vanimeldë.” A resigned note rings in Nimruphêr’s voice. “ _What_ do I need?”

“A new start.” Vanimeldë looks at her. With her back against the door, her arms around her knees, she is almost completely shrouded in shadow, the dark skirts of her dress pooling around her feet. “You could leave the University.”

“Premitting that it would be absolute insanity, given the prestige even my position as a mere researcher gives me and the difficulty of obtaining one—it _is_ the second-best institution in all of Anadûnê, after all...” Nimruphêr smiles, somewhere between melancholy and bitterness. “Of course, I’m just about to be kicked out as is…”

“But people don’t know that,” Vanimeldë points out. “You’d get a reputation.”

“As someone who thought herself too good for the Royal University of Armenelos, that has produced scholars to rival the Elves? Not exactly the kind of reputation I’m aiming for.”

“I wasn’t under the impression that you valued Elves so highly.”

“I’m just saying what the people think.” Nimruphêr lets her head fall back against the door. “It’s good to know what the people think, especially if you’re trying to challenge it.”

“I followed the same courses as you, Eledhwen,” Vanimeldë says, mildly annoyed. “No need to lecture me on propaganda.”

“It’s called _the application of rhetoric to politics_ ,” Nimruphêr says in the ringing tones she only adopts when mocking. Her lips quirk in a smile. “I did some extra reading. Fifty years of it.”

“Clearly it didn’t serve you much,” says Vanimeldë, “as I can _still_ win any argument against you, provided it is on a subject I am not completely unfamiliar with. If there is something I never neglected it was rhetoric.”

“Or politics. I know.” Nimruphêr sighs. “I beg you won’t have me executed for speaking against the Crown—does it count as treason now?—but the King is an idiot for not recognizing you’d make a ruler twice better than anyone since Tar-Telperiën. Including him.”

If Nimruphêr were sober, she’d never say anything like that. Of course, a few years ago she wouldn’t have said it even when drunk out of her mind—not that she would have gotten drunk, either, but the University loosed both her restraint with drink and her tongue on blasphemy and treason. It is an improvement, though Vanimeldë knows she wouldn’t agree if she pointed it out.

So she doesn’t. “You are pardoned,” she says instead, smiling at her. “The good news is that by my father’s estimate he has maybe another fourty years. I’d give him twice as much, just to avoid getting my hopes too high…”

Nimruphêr’s hand flies to cover her mouth, but underneath it she’s grinning. “I take back what I said! Anyone who would speak like that of a monarch you’re _already_ in disfavour with—”

“I’m not in disfavour with him, I’m completely out of his consideration. And _you_ are the one who started the talk of treason.” Vanimeldë grins wider, making sure to bare all her teeth. “I go where the conversation takes me.”

Nimruphêr snorts. Vanimeldë, as they both know, leads the conversation where she wants it to go, and then rides the current to push her adversary under. It doesn’t work with Nimruphêr, which is one reason Vanimeldë loves her. “I don’t have any aspirations to the throne, and besides,” all mirth vanishes from her voice, and looking at her Vanimeldë can see her shaping her next words with care, “to repair to my failings on the matter of—subtlety in the discussion of treason, for one—I’m going to the Academy.”

It’s Vanimeldë’s turn to laugh. “Well, I can’t help you with that.” The Academy, situated on the peak of the northernmost region of Anadûnê, was founded by Tar-Vardamir, who renounced the Sceptre to spend his years secreted away in his scholar’s rock, surrounded by the greatest thinkers of his age. The instution survived his death and flourished, maintained by its members’ fortunes as well as conspicuous support from the Crown. It is exclusive, and _re_ clusive, and arguably better than the University—though the members of both institution would vehemently argue that they cannot be compared, that they serve completely different functions, one to teach, the other to collect and discover and confront. Access to the Academy cannot be bought with titles or money; it is granted upon recognition of talent, honed by experience. And experience is often conflated with age. The last person to be admitted before the age of one hundred was Tar-Telperiën.

“I wasn’t going to ask.” Nimruphêr draws is a breath, hesitates, and lets it out in a rush. “I already got in.”

Nimruphêr is eighty-three.

Vanimeldë’s shock is, surely, excessive. And probably offensive. But when she parts her lips to repair to it, offer felicitations, maybe, what comes out instead is: “You’re leaving again?”

Nimruphêr gives her a surprised look that quickly tempers down into remorse. “I—I can’t stay at the University, you see…”

“I thought,” Vanimeldë interrupts her, “I thought if you couldn’t stay there you’d stay here.” She hadn't even realized, but—yes. She'd expected _that_.

“What would I do?”

“Anything! The Academy, Nimruphêr, it’s on the other side of the country, you’d be away for months at a time…”

“I know!” Nimruphêr says loudly. “I know," she repeats, softer. "But it’s the Academy, Vanimeldë—you spoke of making a reputation for myself. What better way to do it? And when I’m back, I’ll better be able to help you, too.”

Vanimeldë scoffed. “Do you mean to claim you’re doing it for _my_ benefit?”

“Not at all.” Nimruphêr doesn’t have the decency to look even a little abashed. “I want to go. I want to study with the greatest minds of our centuries, I want to read the books they keep secreted away because they’re too revolutionary or too blasphemous, I want to _learn_ —they can say whatever they want, it’s as much an institution of teaching as the University; only the University is sitting right in the King’s face and must tread carefully as a result, and the Academy, far away from scrutiny, is where everything progressive happens.”

A suspicion has been making its way steadily through Vanimeldë’s thoughts. “You knew you had been admitted to the Academy. You got into that argument today on _purpose_.”

 _Now_ Nimruphêr looks a little guilty. “Yes and no. It wasn't my intention—but it wasn't an accident either, I've managed to keep myself on this side of blasphemy for so long, I wouldn't have—” She takes a steadying breath and stills her hands that were fluttering in the air before her, slows their movement until they look like hands again, rather than leaves trembling in a storm. Vanimeldë watches, fascinated—Nimruphêr recomposing her mask is always an interesting spectacle, if only because it's the only time one realizes that there is a mask at all. “I never meant to leave this way,” she says. “But I received Lady Gimlîth's letter and I knew I no longer needed the University, and it made me a little reckless, and then I heard someone who was trying to teach some first-years an _outrageously_ incorrect notion—”

“Let me guess. It was the Rector, and the notion was—wait, wait, I said let me guess.” Vanimeldë appeals to her paltry knowledge of linguistics, absorbed by osmosis in the long years Nimruphêr spent reciting her exam speeches to her, to conjure up the most absurd inconsequential thing she can think of. “Telerin _plusquamperfect_ in its stative form as a second imperfect?”

“Telerin doesn’t have _plusquamperfect_ ,” Nimruphêr informs her haughtily. “It was the understanding of _mor_ and its implications in Elven languages.”

Vanimeldë shakes her head, incredulous. “You jeopardized your career over the evolution of the concept of the root for darkness through languages that have for the most part been dead and gone for two ages.”

“The theories he was presenting as fact have been outdated for at least as long as those languages have been dead! Besides, that’s exactly the reason I’m going to the Academy. To find people who _care_ about these things.”

“And then debate them out of their opinions,” Vanimeldë completes, resigned. Somewhere along the conversation, she's come to accept it—that Nimruphêr will leave, and soon—and all that remains now is the still-abstract knowledge that where her friend sits there will soon be only an empty feeling.

Nimruphêr smiles, but it’s already half wistful. “Will you miss me?” she asks.

Vanimeldë closes her eyes in exasperation, opens them again, fixes them on the figure kneeling on the floor opposite her. “ _Of course_ I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll be back,” Nimruphêr says firmly. “You believe me, don’t you? I’ll always be back.”

Vanimeldë may not be allowed to hold council with the King, but her father holds council with her, and though prevented from taking part in the King’s decisions directly she can influence her father, who can in turn influence the King. It’s not perfect—there are too many degrees of removal for it to be even close; often they disagree, and then only rarely can she convince him of the value of her position over his. Vanimeldë may be skilled in rhetoric, but her father was her teacher.

 _If Lengweär was here_ , she finds herself thinking, often, _if Nimruphêr was here_ , and she always manages to cut down that thought before it can grow thorns to scratch her with. If Nimruphêr were here she could help Vanimeldë persuade her father; if Lengweär was here Vanimeldë would have another mouth in Council to make her voice heard. But more and more often Lengweär is away, happy to spend his days sailing, voyaging to Middle-Earth; and Nimruphêr is happy also, in her retreat on the mountains in the North, living and breathing pure theory that could never be put into practice even when it has some relevance to reality. And Vanimeldë, too, is happy; happy because she genuinely loves this, the elation of seeing something she theorized be made into reality to change reality for the better, and even the endless frustration of arguing and arguing, of straining her abilities to the utmost even when it is fruitless; happy even though she is lonely, without her brother and her beloved, the only friends she ever thought she’d need. When the loneliness becomes too much she steals away to the gardens on top of the palace and lies under the crystal dome, where no one can hear her sing forbidden songs, like the Noldolantë, and revels in that as her mother once reveled in balancing atop banisters over the merciless fall.

When Lengweär comes back, they walk the docks and journey to Rómenna and to Andûnië and he tells her of his adventures on the sea, steals her harp and plays her snippets of the songs she wrote that he heard people sing, and Vanimeldë smiles to know that at least in this way, she makes a difference—though when he catches her she tells him that it’s the awful way he plays, like he has oars for fingers and a storm for a voice, and they snip at each other and fight like they're still twenty.

When Nimruphêr visits she helps. Not always; sometimes her opinions align with Telemmaitë’s rather than Vanimeldë’s or take a turn all of their own, and then they fight, and reconcile only the day before Nimruphêr is to leave because neither of them can stand to be apart with angry words pushing the distance between them even further. When they agree, sometimes they manage to convince Vanimeldë’s father, and then sometimes he manages to convince the Council, and success only crowns a fraction of a fraction of Vanimeldë’s attempts but, she reasons, as a result it’s better than good, given the limitations she has to work around.

And she keeps improving in the arts; her songs are sung across the country, and at palace feasts she dances alone; it is permitted to her because she is good enough that her ability will outweigh the improperty of it, and the looks she receives are all of admiration and none of reproach.

“I heard there is to be a reform regarding the University,” Nimruphêr says, once she’s warmed her fingers around the tea Vanimeldë had a maid bring for her. It’s winter, and outside her window snow falls in heavy flakes, stark white against the sky’s early darkness; drops of water gild Nimruphêr’s night-black hair where they melted in the room’s warmth.

Vanimeldë was unprepared for the visit, and so she did not know what to say at first, and sat curled up on her window drinking in the sight of Nimruphêr as her friend let her lips unfreeze enough to speak. Now she is unprepared for the question, and takes a sip of her own cup of tea as she thinks of an answer. “That is not yet decided, or discussed,” she says eventually. “None outside the palace should know of it.”

“Gimlîth told me. She has,” and here Nimruphêr uncurls her fingers from her cup to attempt what looks like quotation marks, “ _connections_. And they stretch as far as the Council, it seems.”

Gimlîth is Nimruphêr’s loremaster at the Academy. Nimruphêr stopped calling her Lady sometime along the second year, and now refers to her simply by her name, which Vanimeldë is given to understand is customary at the Academy. Gimlîth is, nonetheless, a lady by birth, of a minor nobiliar house of Andûnië; she joined the Academy and devoted her life to the pursuit of knowledge, but her sister married into the House of Elros, and that is likely where her connections originate.

Except for the part about connections, her story is remarkably similar to Nimruphêr’s own. It used to be a joke between them, before Nimruphêr’s relationship with her sister soured to the point where Vanimeldë isn’t sure they speak at all.

Vanimeldë does not mention it now. “And so you came here,” she says instead.

Nimruphêr tilts her head in acknowledgement. “You said the matter is yet undecided. I was counting on it.”

“You want a say in the decision.”

She nods.

Vanimeldë smiles and stands, hearing Nimruphêr rise in turn to follow. Her chambers have expanded through the years, as her work and the number of her possessions increased to require ever more space, and now include a bedroom, a sitting room, a music room and a study, which is where she leads Nimruphêr now. Nimruphêr sits down, and Vanimeldë circles around the table to stand opposite her.

“This is so formal,” Nimruphêr observes, looking around. It’s true; it’s the way Vanimeldë arranged the room to look. A table at the centre, hangings on the walls, a bookcase housing, among others, her mother’s diaries. All dark, though she was careful not to make it oppressive.

But Nimruphêr’s observation is a comment, not a question, so Vanimeldë does not answer it. Instead she starts speaking, and Nimruphêr’s attention returns to her at once. “You know how entry to the University is granted only to those of nobiliar title—”

Nimruphêr nods grimly.

“—well, to put it simply, the gold in the treasury of Númenóre grows thin.”

Nimruphêr raises an eyebrow. “And Umbar?”

“Does not turn enough of a profit, according to the Minister of Finances—who I believe might have a hand in that, but that’s a different matter altogether—and neither does the University.”

Nimruphêr looks incredulous. “You want to _close_ the University? That is what this is about? That’s not a reform, Vanimeldë, it’s—I don’t even know what to call it—it’s oppression of culture.”

“Of course not! This is about making it so the University turns a profit.”

“I thought you meant to speak simply. If by that you mean what I think you mean, that’s monetarization of culture and I disapprove.”

Vanimeldë laughs. “You’ve lost your ear for Court shorthand, Eledhwen—”

“Don't act as though you weren’t intentionally leading me in circles,” Nimruphêr snaps, half-rising.

Vanimeldë holds up her hands, startled by her friend’s vehemence. _This matter is dearer to her than I thought._ “I’m sorry. The proposal is to open the University to those who can afford the tuition.”

“I was not aware that there is a tuition. Did you pay my tuition? Without telling me?” Now she looks more alarmed than angry.

“There is no tuition,” Vanimeldë says. “It was suggested that there be a tuition, from now on.”

Nimruphêr is silent for a while, considering this. Vanimeldë looks at the steam rising in slow, uninterrupted spirals from the cup she set on the table. Her own tea stayed behind in her room.

“Available also to those who can pay for it,” Nimruphêr says eventually, “or only available to those who can pay for it?”

It takes her a moment to understand. “You mean, will those nobles who will not be able to afford tuition still be granted entry—?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose that is one of the details that needs to be discussed,” Vanimeldë says after a pause. “Let’s discuss it.”

Nimruphêr straightens in her seat, eager. “Depending on how high you set it, and from what it sounds like it will be remarkably high—well, a good part of the aristocracy will _still_ be able to afford it in any case, but most might not. You will have a good number of non-noble families eager to pay the fee for their children as well, so it will definitely work out in that sense. However, if you intend the condition to be—well, a condition, excluding those who cannot afford it even if they are noble—I suppose the question is whether you want to change the conditions of admission, or expand them.”

“You’re in favour of expanding them.”

Nimruphêr shrugs. “Nobles will be the ones sitting on your father’s Council, and yours, and your children’s. If they are educated, it can only be for the better.”

“In that case—if nobles will be the ones making the decisions anyway—” Vanimeldë cocks her head to the side. “Do you consider this reform to be positive at all?”

“Positive,” Nimruphêr answers without hesitation. “Undoubtedly. It makes opportunities where there were none, and who knows, in a few generations men and women without titles but who could pay their way into the University will partake in those decisions. Which opens up an entire new array of possibilities for anyone, as riches are easier to acquire than a title.” She sighs and picks up her cup, only to set it down again when she finds it cold. “That’s still not helping with the real problem, though.”

“Which would be?”

“That the University—that education is restricted at all.”

“I know—I _do_ ,” Vanimeldë repeats at Nimruphêr’s skeptical look. “But this entire question arises from the problem that we don’t have the funds to teach all the nobility, never mind the entire population.”

“Not the entire population,” says Nimruphêr, though there’s an undercurrent to her words that says she means rather _not yet_. “But there are different ways to choose the people who receive an education. Fairer ones. Make it a _right_ —a right only for those people who earn it, yes, but not a _privilege_ —”

“That would make trouble with the people who’d see their privileges suddenly revoked.”

“Weren’t you considering retracting them from a part of those people anyway?”

“ _No_ ,” Vanimeldë says, “and in any case they would be only the minor nobles, not the great houses. We _need_ those. Their money. Their power. They have both and that makes their support essential.”

“Doesn’t it _worry_ you how much you rely on their power?”

“That is about so much more than just education, Nimruphêr. You’re speaking of a reform—revoking privileges and restricting power—it could be a disaster, and to even attempt it we would need greater influence on the country, stronger authority even in the most distant regions, enough control that the aristocracy wouldn’t attempt a rebellion and even if they did we’d be able to repress it easily…” She sighs. “It would take years. Decades. I don’t have the authority.”

 _Yet_.

Nimruphêr lets the possibility of it hang in the air for a moment before saying instead, “Then at least request something in exchange for their privileges.”

“We’re doing that. We’re requesting a tuition, and they’ll hardly accept it as is.”

She stands. “More. You could make it look unrelated.”

This conversation started as a discussion on a decision Vanimeldë is not even supposed to have a say in; it is beginning to devolve into pure speculation, but still she asks, “For example?”

Nimruphêr leans forward over the table. “The money you say they are so full of, for one.” Her eyes shine. “Tax them. Surely you—you and your father—have the authority for that.”

“Increase taxation? That would weigh more heavily on the populace.”

“Not _all_ the people. Only them.”

“Impossible. They’d never accept it—”

Nimruphêr shakes her head impatiently. “You can solve that in two ways—either you tax goods, activities, things the people don’t have access to, that would only affect the nobles—I don’t know, voyages across the sea, great land possessions, gold…”

Vanimeldë laughs under her breath, remembering Nimruphêr’s poorly-concealed disgust for the palace’s gilding.

“—or you use an excuse.”

“For example?”

Nimruphêr shrugs. “A rebellion in Umbar, necessity to strengthen local control, employ a greater militia.”

“ _Has_ there been a rebellion in Umbar? That isn’t the kind of thing you can fake, especially if you claim to want to raise more soldiers…”

Nimruphêr waves that away. “No, but there _could_ be.”

Vanimeldë starts smiling. “Are you suggesting I engineer a rebellion in Umbar to have an excuse to raise taxes for education? How would I even do that? Lengweär? And if I did then I’d have to actually pay soldiers to repress the rebellion. And how do you want to use those taxes for education, anyway?”

“I meant that our control in Umbar is unfirm and a rebellion is likely to break out any day, especially if your father were to, for example, exact even greater tribute, or mine the mountains they consider sacred for _mithrim_ …” she shoots Vanimeldë’s silver bracelets a pointed look, “but really, it was just an example. And you don’t have to use those taxes for the University, in any case. I was just saying if they’re going to have their privileges—and that is among them—they might as well pay for it.”

“But you do want to do something with the taxes.”

“Yes. You could institute public schools.”

Vanimeldë frowns. “We _have_ a public school system.”

“It’s bad, and most families don’t send their children, because they’re needed for work. Those who can afford it employ private tutors, and those who can’t end up unable to read. If you had the money to pay an amount of money to the children’s families while they’re in school, for example, the disadvantage of sending children to school would be removed, and it could be an encouragement to pursue further education, as well.”

Vanimeldë shakes her head, but it’s less denial than thoughtfulness. What kind of taxation would such a project require? What kind of research?

(And, she will think later, how does Nimruphêr know any of that? Shut away in the Academy in the middle of nowhere, she’s hardly any closer to the people than Vanimeldë herself.)

She sighs and pushes away from the table. “I’ll try.”

“That’s all I’m asking,” Nimruphêr says, and smiles, and they both pretend it’s not a lie.

Vanimeldë makes her case to her father and her father makes it to the Council, and because it is only the most basic version, regarding only the University, it encounters little resistance. _To open admission to the untitled, under payment of a fee_ , it is phrased; the progressives agree with joy, and the reactionaries accept with relatively few protests, as it takes nothing away from them and represents a first step towards the refilling of the Crown’s coffers.

Her next proposal, taxes that will affect only the nobles, is met with greater resistance. It’s accepted, but Vanimeldë suspects that’s owed more to the King’s progressive decline and her father’s persuasive abilities than its merits or any great support it receives.

The third issue she does not even attempt to discuss, not even with her father. _When he’s King_ , she promises herself, _when he’s King and I have greater influence than this, then I can begin to think on it._ There are other things to think about, other matters her father discusses with her, other debates to be had, and even Nimruphêr does not mention it again.

_The years turn and the world changes_ , she writes in a letter. _The sea steals the sun’s warmth during the day and returns it only at night, when few indeed know to look for it._

 _What does it mean?_ Nimruphêr asks in reply, and Vanimeldë smiles though she cannot be seen. _I don’t know. Sometimes words come without meaning, and it is their cadence that makes them remarkable. I’m sure I can give them a meaning. I’m sure you can, and it will be a different one._

 _And you called me a sophist_ , Nimruphêr writes back, and Vanimeldë can almost hear her laughter.

One day she’ll use those words in a song.

Tar-Ancalimon, fourteenth ruler of Númenor, dies on Midsummer’s Eve as all the island prepares for a feast. The day of his death is declared a day of mourning, as is customary, and her father makes the climb to the Meneltarma alone, to light the pyre on the top: the black smoke it produces will signal the occurrence to the entire island. The King’s funerals, however, are a restricted affair, with only the royal family in attendance, so Telemmaitë’s absence can go unnoticed and unremarked. He is crowned Tar-Telemmaitë, fifteenth ruler of Númenor, a week later. The very next day he names Vanimeldë his Heir. It’s the happiest day of her life, she’ll think later.

The disputes start sooner than any of them expected.

It’s all Tar-Aldarion’s fault, she tells Nimruphêr angrily, pacing her rooms as her friend lies on her bed and listens, and his _damnedly_ vague legislature. A daughter may become Queen: every time she is the eldest? Only if the King does not have male heirs? At the King’s own discetion, as would be if he had two male children? Couldn’t he have been _clearer_ , and in the direction that would suit her?

And now some are saying that no: Lengweär should be Heir. Because it was Tar-Ancalimon’s will that it should be so. No, no, others cry, the new King’s will overrules the previous one’s wishes, and of course Vanimeldë would be as good as any son, but Lengweär is more suited to Kingship. Or even: Vanimeldë’s claim is void not because she is a daughter (what a _ridiculous_ concept!) but because she is a bastard, not the King’s daughter at all…

 _That out of the two of us they would call_ me _the bastard!_ she rages, out of everyone’s hearing except Nimruphêr’s, out of everyone’s hearing and especially her brother’s, _that they would affirm his right over mine on the basis of_ this _, when they all know—_

But that is not something she can say.

That is not something she can fault him for, not Lengweär, who is sweet and merry and suited to court life, yes, but never ruling; Lengweär who never wanted this, who would never think to take it from her.

If only there were a way to shut them up for good, to make her brother ineligible completely, beyond any argument—

—and her eyes skip to her friend, in the increasingly rare times she comes back from the Academy to visit, Nimruphêr who sits on the ground absorbed in yet another book on linguistics, Nimruphêr who is not of the line of Elros, Nimruphêr who her brother’s gaze follows as she walks along the hallways…

… and resolutely draw away.

That too is something she can’t say, or think, or ever consider.

So they live for half a decade, Lengweär resolutely keeping away from Court, Vanimeldë fighting for her power and her right with tooth and claw, feeling it slip between her fingers with every day that passes like so much glassy sand.

It's winter again when Lengweär slams open the doors to his sister’s quarters and marches in. He throws himself onto the couch dramatically, crosses his arms, and waits for her to acknowledge him.

Vanimeldë, perched in her window seat—which in winter she crowds with cushions and quilts that leave just enough space for her to sit without falling—turns a page of her book and ignores him.

Lengweär, who has never been able to outlast his sister’s stubborness, speaks first, imbuing his voice with as much sarcasm as she could ever teach him. “My queen, I beg you, offer your humble subject an audience in these difficult times. And shelter from his foes, I forgot to ask that before I barged in, did I...”

Vanimeldë glances at him, amused. “Who are you running from?”

“Courtiers.” Lengweär groans and leans back, closing his eyes. “They’re crowding— _hounding_ me again.”

“Crowding you?” Vanimeldë turns another page, striving for indifference and pointedly ignoring the direction Lengweär wants the conversation to take. “Is that another expression you picked up from the docks?”

“ _From the docks_ ,” he repeats mockingly. “My, sister mine, how elitist. If Nimruphêr heard you—”

“She’d correct me in Quenya,” his sister says, “which severely undermines your point. It’s all she speaks these days.” She snaps the book closed, giving up on pretense, and throws her head back to call, “Eledhwen!”

“ _Zirunakh_ ,” Nimruphêr’s voice comes from outside the room and a moment later she appears in the doorway, the smile on her face so vicious Lengweär looks like his heart skipped a beat. Her eyes fall on him and alight with glee. “And—”

“Nimruphêr!” he hastens to interrupt her before she can come up with some artful rendering of his name in Adûnaic. Not that he doesn’t like the language—it is _his_ language, more than ever Sindarin, and lately he’s been speaking it so much that purely Adûnaic expressions have started to bleed into his Sindarin—like _crowding_ —but unlike his sister and his friend, he does not enjoy playing around with names. “I thought you were away at the Academy.”

Nimruphêr’s expression—well, doesn’t soften, but it changes into something brighter and less threatening. “I’ve come back to visit your sister,” she shoots a look at Vanimeldë, who smiles impishly, “who does not deserve it. I leave for Rómenna soon.”

“For Rómenna?”

“I will go to Middle-Earth.”

Vanimeldë averts her gaze to avoid meeting the eyes her brother turns on her. “Why would you want to go there?” Lengweär asks cautiously.

“Says the one who spent the last seven years there! I did not even know you had returned.”

“I’ve been back for a while. Vanimeldë didn’t tell you?”

They both look at her. “There was no time,” she says laconically.

Nimruphêr raises an eyebrow. “I’ve been here for days.”

“It slipped my mind.” Vanimeldë turns a brilliant smile on her. “I was _so_ overjoyed to finally have you back.”

Nimruphêr rolls her eyes and Lengweär slumps back into his seat. He glances at the door and then back to the ceiling.

Nimruphêr follows his gaze. “Running from someone, your highness the valiant?”

“I thought _I_ was the Valiant,” Vanimeldë says before her brother can reply. “It was _my_ hair you braided with gold.”

“Yes, but it’s silver! It looked little enough like Fingon’s.”

Vanimeldë brushes a hand through her curls self-consciously. “Using the Sindarin names again, I see?”

“Well, you _see_ , the linguistic implications—”

Lengweär laughs, but there’s little enough of mirth in it that Nimruphêr falls silent and frowns a bit, looking worried. “You’d make a fine Noldorin prince, _melda_ ,” he says, “much better than me! Here I am: lacking both ambition and the courage to confront those who would thrust it upon me.”

“Oh, _courtiers_ ,” says Nimruphêr with contempt. “If it makes you feel better,” she adds, “in some versions of the myth Fingon lacked ambition, too…”

“And in others he shared his cousin’s.”

“Well,” she says, “history is always disputed.”

“History, or myth?” Vanimeldë interjects, unable to help herself.

“Are you _really_ going to do this with me—”

“Anyway,” Lengweär says, silencing them both again. “Is there any way to make it impossible for them to support my—presumed, and, as everyone knows, nonexistent—claim to the throne? One would think the King’s word would be sufficient, and yet…”

“Only you would think that,” Vanimeldë scoffs, and then immediately, “no, I’m sorry—”

He waves his hand dismissively. “No, no, you’re right. You see? That’s exactly the reason you’re a better choice. Your father knows it. Everyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear knows it. I don’t _know_ why they keep insisting.”

 _Because they don’t want a woman on the throne_ , says the look Vanimeldë shares with Nimruphêr, but she doesn’t say that: it would be nothing but salt on wounds she has already reopened. She doesn’t dispute her brother’s claim that she would make the better monarch. She believes the same. Like his mother—perhaps because of her—Lengweär grew up to yearn for freedom over control. As long as her father is King, nothing but annoying, scheming nobles stand in the way of that freedom; but as it is, once he dies…

Unless Lengweär is made ineligible for the throne, there isn’t...

Vanimeldë can see exactly one way out of their situation, and she dislikes it profoundly.

Lengweär is gazing at Nimruphêr, a strange look in his eyes. When he was a child, Vanimeldë was able to read his moods as easily as her own; but he’s been away so long now, and he’s more than a hundred years old, and she—

—she’s seen him look at Nimruphêr that way before, hasn’t she?

She knows that look.

“Nimruphêr,” he says suddenly. She looks to him, questioning. “Will you marry me?”

Vanimeldë closes her eyes for the briefest moment.

“Yes,” Nimruphêr answers.

“It was unexpected, that’s all,” she tells him later, when they are alone. Outside the window, night descends on the city slowly, like mist settling on the hills, hiding them from sight; dusk’s even light wanes and smaller, brighter flames are lit to replace it. At that hour, and seen from the palace’s height, Armenelos might have been the sea, at Erukyermë when the Adûnaim light lanters and free them into the night, to fly fire over the waves.

Vanimeldë does not look at her brother.

“I was not sure you would approve,” he says.

“Do you take me for your mother, to give my blessing for your choice of a spouse?” It comes out harsher than she intended. She softens her voice. “I know no better woman. No better person.”

“I know,” he says, matching her tone. “I know. I thought—the only way I’ll be left alone is if I become ineligible to the throne, isn’t it?”

That surprises her enough that she turns, but his eyes are distant and he does not meet her gaze. “You did it for purely political reasons?” she asks, and doesn’t know whether she feels relieved or outraged or impressed.

Lengweär hesitates.

“Oh,” she says. “You love her.”

He looks at her and their eyes met at last. “Yes.”

“Does _she_ love you?”

Lengweär shrugs helplessly. “I hope so? I think she does.”

Vanimeldë thinks back to the way Nimruphêr’s eyes lit up when Lengweär asked, the quick succession of emotions that passed on her face and the joy it ended in. The way she always looked somewhat uncomfortable talking about him, lately. The nights she’d disappear, when she still lived in the palace, and on returning neglect to explain—as she did so many things, so Vanimeldë didn’t wonder overmuch. The curiously neutral, careful way she spoke of him. The times Vanimeldë turned to look at her and found her gazing at nothing, colour in her cheeks, and at her teasing and questioning Nimruphêr only laughed and pushed her away, but her blush deepened…

Did she misunderstand?

All this time—did she fail to see something so _close_ to her?

In any event. She smiles. “Happiness and joy,” she wishes him with the customary words to a couple, “and many children,” and laughs as her brother’s face flushes red, and it is hardly even forced.

She is with Nimruphêr when their child is born four years later, and holds her hand through all the blood and tears and screaming, until the medic hands her the baby and she holds it up for the mother to see. _A daughter_ , the woman says, and Vanimeldë knows it’s not meant kindly, but Nimruphêr laughs with joy, as Eäriel had. The child has her mother’s dark eyes and pale skin and the silver hair of the line of Elros, and even before she is named Vanimeldë nicknames her Míriel.

Lengweär is equally delighted. _Her name is Azruzâir_ , Nimruphêr says firmly, and they all smile at the medics’ disapproving glares.

 _Azruzâir_ , Vanimeldë repeats, and wonders that Nimruphêr would name her daughter for the sea. Playfully, she adds, _you should have named her Míriel._

Nimruphêr looks at her and laughs, and then Lengweär laughs as well, and she watches them happy and bright and thinks, _this is something I could write about_. And _this is something I won’t write about_ , because there is something intensely private in their happiness, Nimruphêr laughing for a joke on Elves and Lengweär laughing simply because his wife is happy and he loves her, that does not belong in a song, for others to marvel at; something that is meant to be lived only once and not reenacted by strangers.

Perhaps, Vanimeldë thinks, that is why we prefer tragedy: because pain reaches across words and voices to touch even those who did not feel it themselves, but happiness is unique, ephemeral, easily blown out by a careless breath.

Then she does not see them very often. Vanimeldë is busy at court—keeps herself busy at court if she’s honest about it, which she isn’t—and Lengweär crosses the sea to act as an ambassador to Middle-Earth or just crosses the sea because he wants to, and Nimruphêr does not immediately go with him as Vanimeldë would have expected but keeps working at the Academy. Little Azruzâir is taken one way or the other or left with her, and Vanimeldë keeps her company when her parents are away and calls her _Míriel, Little Queen_. 

“She loves you,” Nimruphêr observes one day as they sit in the gardens, Azruzâir climbing over Vanimeldë to reach for the branches hanging heavy with fruit behind them. Vanimeldë picks one and hands it to the child and watches her turn it over in her hands with that special kind of fascination that inevitably disappears with age. “I should hope so,” she says, half-smiling.

“That’s good,” Nimruphêr says. “I was thinking… I want to go to Middle-Earth.”

“Still?”

“Again,” she corrects her. “Yes. Anadûnê grows stifling.”

 _It is not Anadûnê_ , Vanimeldë could say, _it’s you, it’s the airless rooms you shut yourself in, it’s the things you surround yourself with, things of the past._ She does not. She loves her friend. She understands. “Soon?”

“Soon,” Nimruphêr confirms. Azruzâir, now seated backwards on Vanimeldë’s knees, abruptly lets go of her clothes and lets herself slip backwards. She falls turning over her head and tumbles onto the soft grass with a delighted shriek.

“Will you be gone long?” Vanimeldë asks.

“Not long, not yet. Azruzâir is young…” she looks down at her daughter with something soft and distant in her gaze. “I do not wish to leave her overlong.”

“You could delay,” Vanimeldë suggests hopefully. “Wait until she is a bit older.”

“No! I have delayed enough. Seven years!” She reaches down to grab at the child, who slips away, still laughing.

“ _Zîrân_!” a voice calls, and a moment later Lengweär appears from behind the patio. Azruzâir runs to him and he catches her as she reaches him, lifting her onto his shoulders in one easy movement. “Vanimeldë,” he greets her. “Has Nimruphêr told you, then?”

“You are leaving.”

“In a few days,” he confirms. “Have you asked her if she will keep Azruzâir for us, _zîrân_? I know you are very busy, sister, and I would hate…”

“Nimruphêr did not phrase it like I had a choice,” Vanimeldë jokes. “No, I’d be offended if you _didn’t_ give her to me.”

They both look at Nimruphêr, waiting for her to add on the jest, but she is staring at nothing, absorbed in her thoughts. Vanimeldë nudges her. “Yes,” Nimruphêr says then, and smiles. “We are very grateful.”

Looking at her, Vanimeldë finds her suspicions almost confirmed.

“Nimruphêr,” she says, “a word?”

She leads them to her study again, which is not a conscious choice on her part but should have been, really. She closes the door and walks to the window and stands there, watching Nimruphêr walk around the room. No changes have been made since she last saw it that would justify such a scrutiny, though maybe that’s its own justification: she’s making sure nothing has changed. She would do that.

“ _You_ did it for political reasons,” Vanimeldë says abruptly.

Nimruphêr has the grace to look startled, though it’s gone quickly. “Everything is about politics, now more than ever. What in particular did I do?”

“The marriage.”

“Oh.” She brushes her hands along one of the tapestries, along the wall, turns back to reach the bookcase, turns back again, away from Vanimeldë. “I did.”

Vanimeldë shakes her head, even though Nimruphêr can’t see her. “But why?” Lengweär she could understand. But her—

Nimruphêr stops pacing and turns to face her. “Do you remember our discussion about the education system?”

More than twenty years before, Vanimeldë still trying to maneuver her grandfather from her father’s shadow, Nimruphêr submerged in the forge of revolution that was the Academy. “I remember.”

“I argued my position and I thought I had convinced you, and yet nothing’s changed. Nothing has changed,” she repeats more forcefully when Vanimeldë makes to interrupt her, “not because you didn’t try, but because it isn’t enough. It’s not enough because you don’t really care, Zirunakh, no matter what you say, it will never affect you and you did this to humour me and it was not enough. You’re not enough. I was not enough. I had no influence whatsoever on anything that happens.”

“You are a renowned scholar, Nimruphêr, your treatises are world-famous—”

Nimruphêr slams her hands on the table, with enough force that Vanimeldë flinches back. “I _wrote_ about it. And _no one cares_. No one listens to scholars, Zirunakh, and no one would listen to me unless I put myself in a position that allows me some _real_ influence, influence that does not depend on more powerful people agreeing with me.”

“You _used_ my brother!” Vanimeldë bursts out. 

A startled moment’s shock passes on Nimrupêr’s expression before it closes off completely into something cold and dark. “ _You_ used your brother,” she bites back savagely. “You used your father and you used me, all to get to a throne that would have been—that will be yours anyway! And not for a reason, either, you just want power for its own sake. I am trying to change something—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Vanimeldë cries. “This isn’t about me! My father asked for my council and you were more than willing to help. You _married_ him! You made him believe you loved him!”

“I never—”

“You see,” Vanimeldë interrupts her, dropping her voice suddenly—and Nimruphêr involuntarily stops speaking and then immediately looks furious—“I didn’t want you to marry him. But then I thought you loved him!”

“I do love him,” Nimruphêr says, her eyes skipping away guiltily.

Vanimeldë feels her voice start to rise again. “Do not. I thought you were in love with him,” she says, switching to Adûnaic, which unlike the Elven-tongues makes the distinction. 

Nimruphêr’s lips tighten into a line. “Why do you _care_? He’s happy, and I’m happy, and you’re—”

“ _No_. No. He thinks you love him. But it’s all a lie—”

“But that’s not it,” Nimruphêr says slowly, no longer listening. “That isn’t it. It’s not that he’s not happy, it’s that you—this isn’t about him at all, is it?”

Vanimeldë’s heart skips, actually skips, she feels a pit open up in her gut. “What would you _know_ —”

“I know,” she says and her voice changes again, soft, and that is another rhetoric artifice but the trouble with that is that it works even if she knows what’s happening. “I’m your friend.”

Vanimeldë throws it all to the wind. They won’t recover from this, she can tell, so why not take it all the way down? “Yes,” she snarls, and Nimruphêr flinches back. “I’m your _friend_. And then you _go_ and _marry_ my _brother_. And why should I care that you don’t love him, except that I thought you loved _me_ —” she pauses, heaving for breath, as though she’s been running or dancing or reciting a lengthy speech instead of only a few very, very heavy words, and then her voice only comes out as a whisper. “And it was fine loving you from a distance, but close like this—did you really think I was happy?”

She does not know what she expects. Anger, perhaps, condemnation, refusal. But what she sees in Nimruphêr’s eyes is indecision, her mask cracked to reveal her in battle against herself. Vanimeldë waits as the silence stretches and cracks, waits again for refusal, rejection, hate. But Nimruphêr only stands there, and though she trembles still she hesitates.

Whatever the outcome, Vanimeldë decides, she can't—won't—wait forever. And so she waits another moment—the last—and then walks past her silent friend, out of the room, leaving her behind.

That night she does not go back to her rooms. She steals away to her secret garden, but she has no harp to play and her voice, if she tried to raise it in song, would crack with tears she does not want to shed.

Vanimeldë keeps her mask and keeps her silence.

She does not see Nimruphêr again until three days later, when she goes to see them at the docks before they leave. It is before dawn; Azruzâir, who Lengweär said goodbye to when he accompanied her to Vanimeldë’s rooms the day before, is still there, sleeping. Vanimeldë has come to say her own goodbyes. To her brother she offers a smile and a branch of silver leaves, a tradition long abandoned but nonetheless known to all mariners, and he leaves his sister and his wife on the dock to place it on the ship’s bow himself.

To Nimruphêr she offers nothing at all as they stand silently, facing each other.

Vanimeldë cannot wait forever.

As she turns to leave Nimruphêr catches her hand. “Please,” she says, seeming to struggle for words. “I—”

“ _Zîrân_!” comes Lengweär’s voice from behind her. It seems to break her indecision. Nimruphêr casts a quick look over her shoulder, then raises their interlocked hands to her lips and presses a kiss to Vanimeldë’s fingers.

“Please,” she repeats. “I’m sorry. We—we will talk. I will be back. I will always be back.”

And she is gone, leaving Vanimeldë to look after her until the ship disappears over the horizon, feeling both heavier and lighter than before.

She waits for the ship to return.

But weeks pass, and months, and a year and then two, and the ship does not return. And no news come. And Vanimeldë’s anticipation slowly turns to worry, to fear, to dread; and finally the dread is replaced by a cold, burning certainty coiling in her gut, rising suddenly to swallow her when she least expects it, and it whispers—

— _they’re dead, they’re dead, they’re gone_ —

Vanimeldë does not heed it. Vanimeldë does not let it overtake her, does not let herself drown, but Vanimeldë does not ignore it, either. Every few days or every few weeks—every time her obligations allow it—she looks for news. She grows used to disappointment; grows to expect it, even. When Azruzâir asks her of her parents, she does not smile and assure her all will be well; _I do not know, little one_ , she says, _but when I know I will tell you, and I will tell you the truth_.

The feeling does not go away. It leave for months at a time and then comes back unexpected. In her sleep. In the middle of the day. At a royal audience, when a mariner steps into the throne room and suddenly—

—suddenly Vanimeldë feels dread rise in her gut, there and then gone, and subsiding it leaves behind a disquiet, the feeling of seeing the sky start to darken and waves start to rise, and suddenly becoming very, very aware of the vastness of the sea and the smallness of your ship.

The man bows. Vanimeldë, seated at her father’s right, leans forward and does not grip the sides of her chair, keeps her hands in her lap, folded so no one will see the way her fingers curl into each other. The man rises.

Grim-faced, he starts to speak.

Vanimeldë never used to be afraid of the sea. She is a a daughter of Anadûnê, of an island, of the sea; she was raised in Rómenna, among ships and harbours and isles. As a child, she snuck out on moonless nights, slipped past the harbour-guard to swim in darkness—for the thrill of doing something forbidden and dangerous, yes, but also for the starlight on the water, the way the surface rippled and changed, disrupting every reflection as it formed, for the cold sand under her feet and the water’s apparent warmth on her skin. Her brother learned his love for the sea from her; Vanimeldë it was that held his hand and coaxed him into the waver, Vanimeldë that taught him to swim, to dive, to go farther and deeper and to love the great expanse of blue, the lightless depths, to watch from the bow of a ship as land grew ever smaller behind her, until it vanished and all that remained was the sea.

The sea.

The sea that has taken him from her.

A freak storm, they call it. Hit the ship in full and struck them off course; so far off course that it shattered on shores they were not prepared to find and did not see in the dark. The wreckage was found by the locals— _the locals_ , unspecified—and some of the cargo that had remained intact arrived, passing through hands and hands, to Lindon. And swiftly fearing for the worst the elves sent to those lands to glean what had passed, and what knowledge they obtained they passed to a ship of Númenor that was then in harbour, waiting to return…

Vanimeldë sits, composed, through the man’s speech. She sits as her father stands and thanks the man and offers him stay in the palace and invites him to give more detailed information at a later date (in private council, it is implied). She stands when her father declares the audience closed, walks down the steps of the daïs when he announces the royal family will retire. As soon as the great doors to the throne room close behind her, she turns and _runs_.

Nimruphêr said Vanimeldë had something she called a _silent grace_. That whether she walked or ran or danced, unless she spoke or sang it was impossible to hear her. She had that look in her eyes when she said it that she usually reserved for handwritten copies of Elven lore—

Vanimeldë runs through halls and hallways and stairs and hears doors slam open behind her, hears her footsteps pound on the floor, ricochet off the walls and ceilings and echo through halls made to let sound carry. If Nimruphêr were here to hear this she would no longer—

Nimruphêr—

Vanimeldë slams the doors to her quarters closed behind her and screams.

Once when her brother was in a good mood he said even her shouting was melodic. He said it sounded like something a composer would spin from notes and keys for an opera singer to lose their voice on, not the anger of a real person. When he was angry, he’d phrase it differently— _Stop_ singing _, Vanimeldë!_ he would scream, and it never failed to rob her of her voice for at least a moment.

Vanimeldë screams and screams and screams and chokes on her own sobs. Her body folds in two with the strength of her grief, her chest choking every last breath of air out of her lungs to kindle one scream after another.

Her brother. Her brother who broke all the rules and did not hate her for receiving the throne that most thought belonged to him. Her brother, named for the sea—

And Nimruphêr—

_—there were no survivors—_

Vanimeldë screams.

_But how can you not fear it at all? It’s not dangerous, Lengweär, not for us, we’re strong and brave and lady Uinen will protect us…_

Vanimeldë screams.

_… and she rules over her husband as certainly as he rules over storms…_

Vanimeldë screams.

_… we’re safe in the water, hanno, do not fear._

Vanimeldë—

“ _Atar-nésa_?”

—Vanimeldë opens her eyes when she’s finished choking on the scream she won’t let free and sees her brother’s daughter, her friend’s daughter, little Azruzâir named for her father named for the _sea_ —

—standing in the doorway looking at her wide-eyed and scared.

“Azruzâir,” she says. Her throat hurts; her voice is nothing but a hoarse whisper. She wipes her hair out of her face and dries her fingers on her dress. “Come here, child.”

“What happened?” Azruzâir asks. She asks like one who fears the answer already and asks only because they’re more afraid of doubt than of having their fears confirmed.

Vanimeldë hesitates. _You do not lie to your children._ She swallows. “Your parents are lost,” she says, her voice breaking once more.

She feels small hands touching her shoulders and looks up to see her niece staring down at her, something trapped in her eyes. “My father told me Lady Uinen would protect them.”

Vanimeldë pushes down the bitterness welling up in her throat. “He lied.”

“My father does not lie to me.”

“Yes,” Vanimeldë whispers, her own words from years before echoing back to her. “True, he would not lie to you intentionally. But sometimes we are honest, and then the world makes liars of us.”

_It’s not dangerous, Lengweär, Lady Uinen will protect us._

Azruzâir draws back and stares at her. “They are dead.”

“Yes.”

Azruzâir does not cry. Azruzâir kneels on the floor and buries her face in Vanimeldë’s shoulder, and they sit there holding each other, and the child does not cry.

Vanimeldë never sees her cry, afterwards, but there is a deeper darkness to her gaze, and a shadow that slips into her voice sometimes.

Her father, who suffered that treatment from his own father, never forces her to marry. He does, however, strongly counsel it.

Vanimeldë understands. She is a woman, after all, and even if she is her father’s first (and now only) choice of successor, people will not want her as Queen. The years between Tar-Ancalimon’s death and Lengweär’s were evidence enough of that. No: there has not been a Queen since Tar-Telperiën, though rarely was a King’s firstborn a son, and they do not want her to be the first.

Vanimeldë _will_ be the first. If she needs a son to be considered worthy, if she needs a husband, if she needs someone to hide behind until people are so accustomed to her as a shadow that they won’t flinch, won’t even notice, when she steps into the light—

—Vanimeldë was schooled in the art of ruling and speaking by her father, who saw promise in her keen mind and sharp intellect and interest in politics. From her mother, the burning voice choked in ink, she received different lessons, on the various tools that could be used to change the minds of the masses, the many ways to turn a person’s words and thoughts and opinions against themselves, how to win a debate without letting her adversary know they had been beaten. Her father said: choose someone who will make you happy. Her brother told her: choose someone you can share your mind with. Her mother warned: it is not enough to believe they won’t turn against you; make sure to choose someone who can’t. Vanimeldë knows to choose wisely.

Vanimeldë, wise, intelligent, skilled in the guessing of minds and the playing of them, heeds all their advice, and never thinks her judgement could be _wrong_.

Herucalmo is her cousin, not even so distant, though they had never met before—his branch of the family, descended from Tar-Atanamir’s daughter, dwells in Emerië—and their union would be on the edge of scandal. But he is sweet, and smart, and he can make her laugh and talk for hours, though she can anticipate his retorts with comforting regularity. 

He is not Lengweär. He is not Nimruphêr. He does not replace what she’s lost, neither in political nor emotional value.

But she wasn’t looking for a replacement anyway, and as a figurehead he will do nicely. If she needs someone to stand beside, better yet if it is not one she cannot stand at all.

They follow all the customs, asking the King’s blessing on their betrothal before announcing it to the court, extending it for three full years, right until the wedding itself. She insists that they wed in winter, to echo her mother; her father smiles sadly and indulges her without protest. The cycle takes another step forward. Vanimeldë wears black, which is all she’s worn since the shipwreck, and a white jewel on her brow; it will remind people of Tar-Erendis. The implications can burn on the wind. Nimruphêr would be horrified.

(“After your mother broke it, it was already no longer such a firm tradition,” Azruzâir observes. “And now you are setting a new one. Soon the tradition will be to wed in the season that most represents the bride.”)

Their son is born two years later. She names him Aglarân, in Adûnaic, and Herucalmo, still accomodating, still loving, does not seem to mind—perhaps he too is used to the language, living among the people in Emerië. (Then again, she does not know how he lived in Emerië, and as it will turn out, he is not close to the people at all.) She does not, not for an instant, believe herself in love, but it is a comfortable life, as her father had with Almanís: what does it matter that there’s not that sort of love between them? They are happy.

For a while, they are happy.

She watches her children grow. In Aglarân she sees her brother, even thinks she catches sometimes a glimpse of her mother, when his eyes light up in a way she’s sure hers never did; her mother the way she would’ve been, though of course her father is the only one who could really tell her and he stopped speaking of Eäriel to Vanimeldë long ago. Azruzâir is so alike her own mother, and so unlike her too. Vanimeldë sees her grow from an outsider’s perspective, and she sees the girl’s hunger for knowledge, and her inclination for history, for dynamics and speculation, yes, but the kind that leads back to tangible occurrences, rather than Nimruphêr’s love for language and rhetoric’s pure words. Azruzâir is sixteen when Aglarân is born, old enough to still prefer her aunt’s company to her cousin’s at first, but as he grows Aglarân gradually replaces Vanimeldë by her side. Azruzâir still listens to her and turns to her out for guidance or help or stories, but more and more often if she wants someone to share her findings with it will be Aglarân, if she looks for an adverse opinion to debate it’s him she seeks out.

That is fine, that is natural, Vanimeldë tells herself, and turns to her work.

And work there is: her father grows old, and delegates more and more of ruling to her. He also grows distrustful, suspicious of all who surround him except her, especially after Almanís passes away; and Vanimeldë can feel the same distrust start to affect her as well, her father’s influence coupled with her own dislike of the Council that oppose her for no reason she can help, and she can see how it could be disastrous if it were to overtake her.

She swears she will not let it control her. She will not be Fëanor.

The obvious next thought would be _but what if I am Celebrimbor instead_ , but she chalks that up to her paranoia and doesn’t heed it.

Later she will wonder if that was what Celebrimbor did, too. Chalk it up to his paranoia and not heed the voice that said _don’t trust that man: he’s trouble_.

She will also wonder if maybe he didn’t hear that voice at all.

Almost one century. They have almost an entire century of happiness, in which Azruzâir becomes a scholar, like her mother, and Aglarân a politician like _his_ mother, and Vanimeldë consolidates her power at court until she’s effectively in control.

That’s when the problems start.

Minor incidents, at first. Herucalmo opposes her proposal on easing taxes in the northern regions, and he has good arguments and makes good points, and they haven’t talked about this, have they? She still manages to overcome him easily, to sway the rest of the Council to her side with little effort. But then it happens again. And again.

As a rule—as per her mother’s instructions—Vanimeldë lets others underestimate her. She uses the bare minimum of her abilities that will allow her to manage the problem at hand—with her father’s decline she finally runs out of worthy opponents—and lets the rest lie out of sight, reassuring her that she can always do better but invisible to anyone else. But it gets _harder_. Each time she contends with Herucalmo over some matter of disagreement she has to try a bit harder, employ more of her eloquence to match his.

The pressure builds and builds until she and her husband barely speak outside of Council and then only in edges and cuts and cruel double meanings, until their arguments become less matters of state than personal battles, until her son and her niece take to avoiding her and her progressively fraying nerves.

But like the tide, it still rises and falls. Cracks form; then every few years they are melded and an attempt at reconciliation is made and accepted. The structure’s stability wanes and weakens, but the surface looks intact once more. And then their discussions stay within the bounds of courtesy, their attitude to each other is conciliatory and accomodating, the children return.

It is during one of these times that the children return married.

“Married, _both_ of you?” Herucalmo asks at first, and then, as realization runs its course, “To _each other_?”

Vanimeldë sets down her cup of tea, folds her hands in her lap, and turns a smile on them. It’s her best smile, the one she doesn’t use on people outside of her family. “I am very happy for you,” she says, letting the smile convey what her scant words won’t, and to Herucalmo she adds, “Husband. A word?”

They step out into the gardens, and then they walk further, and when they are on the terrace—high enough in the palace that the wind blows so strong it covers any words spoken—only then does Herucalmo speak. “Did you know of this?” he asks.

“I did not,” Vanimeldë says, and because they are in the middle of a truce her husband does not accuse her of lying.

“This is unacceptable,” he says instead.

“Why would that be?”

He turns an incredulous look on her. “Vanimeldë, they’re _cousins_.”

It’s her turn to be surprised. “Surely you heard the rumours—” But no, he wouldn’t have. He lived secreted away in Emerië, did he not? Away from the gossip of the court. He wouldn’t know. “Surely you’ve heard that my father remarried only on Tar-Ancalimon’s imposition,” she amends. “It is the opinion of many in Armenelos that their marriage was purely a formal one.”

“Is it true?” he asks.

Vanimeldë leans against the banister and lets the wind play in her hair, tugging it loose from its intricate braids. “It is certain that Queen Almanís had a lover.”

“So Azruzâir is not of the Line of Elros,” Herucalmo says, coming to join her on the edge of the terrace.

“Of course she is. Almanís was of the line of Elros, and Lengweär was her son, and Azruzâir is _certainly_ his daughter.”

He still looks dubious. “Will people accept it?”

“There will be those who complain, perhaps with the same arguments as you used, though,” and she glares at him briefly, “more tactfully put. But most of those who could make trouble know the truth about my brother. If they make a complaint it will be purely formal, and swiftly dropped.”

“But formally our son’s marriage is a—a disgrace.”

Vanimeldë carefully keeps all the impatience from her voice. “Your only other option is to keep the identity of the mother secret, and that would put her appartenence to the Line of Elros and therefore our son’s eligibility to the throne into question—”

Herucalmo holds up a hand, no longer listening. “The _mother_?”

 _Oh._ She must be tired, to make such a mistake. That or more irritated than she realizes. “Azruzâir is with child, she tells me.”

“You _did_ know about it, then.”

“They told me a moment before they told you, after everything was done already.” Vanimeldë sighs, feeling suddenly tired. Tired of the constant battling, tired of the doubts she knows she should heed more, tired of her own tiredness. “Truly, Herucalmo, I cannot see where your problem with this lies.”

“I was only surprised,” he says mildly, and bends to kiss her brow. “Let us go back, shall we? I believe I have an apology to make. And felicitations to offer.”

Vanimeldë smiles and takes his proffered hand and does not believe him.

It is the end of their truce.

The real problem, she’ll think later, was not the arguments; it was the armistices. If there had been a constant, consistent souring of their relationship, everything might have gone very differently; she would have been more diffident, surely, more careful. As it is, in the times of quiet she still enjoys his company, she is still more unguarded with him than she should be, given that in other times they are little less than enemies. 

That is her undoing.

It’s in one such period of quiet that Azruzâir and Aglarân come to ask her blessing for a journey. Their son—Elcalan, they called him, defying traditions both public and private by giving him a Sindarin name—is seven years old, and they want to take him to Middle-Earth. They do not _say_ that they want to keep him from court life, especially as tense as it is becoming with the strife they leave in the wake of their arguments forcing more and more people to choose sides, but then it goes well enough unsaid.

Vanimeldë made a point never to forbid her son the sea or sailing, by the logic that it would only make him long for it more. As he showed no inclination for it, she thought he would stay uninterested, thought herself safe.

Clearly that was not the case.

They have anticipated her fears, her objections. It will be safe, they argue, they’ll be sailing in high summer when the sea is calmest, far from both spring and autumn storms. There is no danger.

 _Azruzâir_ , she says, _your parents too thought they were safe; it was a freak storm that killed them_.

 _But that was decades ago, when our ships were more fragile, our navigation less experienced_ , they counter readily.

They want to go to Middle-Earth; they want to see the hills and sands of Umbar, taste the shadows of the Elven-forests. Herucalmo too, who was born and raised deep inland and always regarded the sea with a dose of suspicion, agrees with them this time.

Vanimeldë relents.

On the day they’re meant to sail, she and Herucalmo leave them in Rómenna, and ride back to the palace together. They haven’t fought in months. She confides her fears, and he offers reassurances, and kisses her brow, and rings for wine before leaving her to her solitude.

In that moment, their last argument distant enough that it’s not the first thing that comes to mind when she thinks of him, their situation reminds her strongly of Telemmaitë and Almanís’ marriage.

There is a knock on her door, and before Vanimeldë can answer it opens and Azruzâir slips in.

“Our departure was delayed,” she explains with a smile, anticipating Vanimeldë’s question. “We sail tomorrow instead. I thought to spend some time with you. Aglarân is with his father,” she adds.

Vanimeldë leans back against the window. “For a moment, when you came in,” she says, “I thought I saw your mother.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says, surprised. “Why would you be?”

Azruzâir shakes her head and doesn’t reply. Instead she asks, “Am I very like her?”

“Very,” says Vanimeldë. “And not. You look very much like her, except your hair—do you remember I called you Míriel when you were little? Your mother was Morwen.”

“Did she choose it, herself?”

“She said if I really had to call her by a name that wasn’t hers, it might at least be one of Men.” She smiles at the memory. “She liked us more than Elves. I called her Eledhwen anyway, for Morwen, but also because it was the Sinda for her name. As revenge she nicknamed me Zirunakh.”

“ _Moving to love_?”

“As a rendition of _movingly lovely_.”

“An imperfect one,” Azruzâir observes, raising an eyebrow.

“An artistic translation, she called it. She was fond of them. She said you could never render a meaning perfectly when changing the language, and _zirunakh_ was closer to the intended meaning in Adûnaic.”

“She sounds like a book on linguistics.”

“That is because you learned linguistics from her books,” Vanimeldë says. “It was her passion, more than history or politics, even.”

Azruzâir raises her chin haughtily, which is such an intensely Nimruphêr gesture that Vanimeldë's heart clenches painfully. “History is interesting.”

“I agree wholeheartedly. Your mother liked to argue, as well, though when I debated her the conversation always ended up flying wildly out of aim; you are better at following a thread and keeping us all anchored.”

Azruzâir snorts. “That must not have won her many debates.”

“On the contrary, she was one of the best I’ve ever heard. But she would get into arguments that would get her in trouble—you know how she came to join the Academy? That happened because she fought with half the University over some—disputed root meanings, I think. A family tradition, apparently,” she adds, casting Azruzâir an amused glance.

“I was _right_ , and they were wrong.”

“She said that, yes.”

Azruzâir laughs. “May I?” she asks, nodding to the wine on Vanimeldë’s desk. Vanimeldë pours it into the single goblet her maid brought with the bottle and crosses the room to offer it to her niece. 

“To my mother,” Azruzâir says, raising the glass before downing it in all at once.

When she stumbles and falls it slips through her fingers to shatter on the ground.

They find them quickly, Herucalmo and Aglarân both, walking into the room together just to halt in shock at the sight of Vanimeldë kneeling on the floor with her niece’s still-warm body in her arms. Shards of glass cover the ground around them, but neither man seems to notice—Aglarân immediately rushes to her side and Herucalmo takes one look at the scene and starts calling for help, and for once Vanimeldë is glad of the command in his tone.

Everything happens very quickly after that.

Azruzâir is dead, of course. Some poison in the wine; and since the wine was meant for Vanimeldë, the poison must have been as well. She receives the news with a calm that shocks even her, but she feels nothing of the piercing grief that accompanied Nimruphêr and Lengweär’s deaths; only a strange numbness. Azruzâir died of a poison meant for her. Now Vanimeldë sails on the ship meant for Azruzâir, her son and grandson by her side, at Herucalmo’s urging: she is not safe in Númenórë, he says, not until the poisoner is found.

She leaves.

She is not thinking clearly, that is the only explanation, that is the only reason she could have failed to see what is happening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anadûnê and Númenórë are Númenor; the Adûnaim, likewise, are the Númenóreans. Andúnië and Rómenna are major harbour towns, one to the west, one to the east.  
>  _Almanís_ is flower-woman in Quenya.  
>  _Lengweär_ means sea-yearning in Quenya. _Azruzâir_ is sea-longing in Adûnaic, _azra_ , sea, modified in _-u_ (because it's the object of the longing), + _zâir_ , longing.  
>  _Aglarân_ is the Adûnaic version of Alcarin, "glorious".  
>  _Elcalan_ means star-light (êl-calan) in Sindarin. Tar-Calmacil's Adûnaic name was Ar-Belzagar, but they're both very war-related and the kind of people I made Azruzâir and Alcarin to be would not name their child for war, so his birth-name is different and both the other names are (will be) self-chosen.  
> Rôthinzil's Quenya equivalent would be _Falmalótë_ (foam-flower). Nimruphêr, like Eledhwen, means elf-maiden, and the latter is in the Silmarillion as an epithet of Morwen, who was said to be as beautiful as an elf. Their parents were named Abrazân and Lôminzil, _Voronda_ and _Lómilótë_ (steadfast and night/twilight-flower) in Quenya, which is where Nimruphêr's patronimic ( _Vorondiel_ , daughter-of-Voronda) stems from.  
>  _Hantantye_ and _melda_ mean "thank you" and "beloved" in Quenya. Vanimeldë's name can be interpreted as _vanima_ + _elda_ "as beautiful as an elf" or _vanima_ + _melda_ "beautiful and beloved". I go with the second version, in which case the name's meaning becomes "movingly lovely", which is what Nimruphêr draws on when she gives her an Adûnaic moniker — _zir-_ is the root for "to love", _-u-_ an objective modifier (added to the end of a word to show that it is the object of the action) and _nakh-_ means "to move".  
>  _Zîrân_ is "beloved" in Adûnaic.  
>  _Atar-nésa_ means "aunt" in Quenya (literally, father-sister, as Quenya doesn't have a word for aunt and Vanimeldë is the sister of Azruzâir's father—not really, but formally she is). _Hanno_ is an affectionate form of "brother", again in Quenya.
> 
> "And in all ways unlike Míriel" is the way Indis is described in the Silmarillion. 
> 
> When Vanimeldë says "the lesser Men [of Middle-Earth]", that is _her_ opinion of Middle-Earthern Men, as a princess of Númenor who's been told all her life that not only she's the best of her people, but her people are the best of the world by virtue of divine decree. It is not _my_ opinion. Other opinions expressed are also the opinions of the characters who express them (or narrate them), not mine.
> 
> I don't know if Telerin has _plusquamperfect_ ; it is not one of Tolkien's most developed languages so it probably does not. Latin and Ancient Greek do; in Greek the _perfect_ can have stative value, in which case it's used the same way as an imperfect tense. I mixed it all up. I did this on purpose. I swear I'm actually a language student and not a fraud.  
>  _Mor_ is the Quenya/Sindarin root for darkness, as in _Morgoth_ (dark foe), _Morwen_ (dark maiden).
> 
> On the matter of Númenórean primigeniture and whether women could ascend the throne even if she had male brothers, Tolkien couldn't agree with himself—the answer is "yes" in The Mariner's Wife (the eldest is the heir, man or woman), and "no" in the Appendixes of the Lord of the Rings (women always come after men). I made it as though this was an in-universe problem as well, that in the bright and happy times (in Vanimeldë's view) when kings could do what they wanted without having to answer to a council, Aldarion made that law intentionally vague because... he didn't want to decide? He's dead so no one can ask him.


	3. Vanimeldë

In Umbar, time passes slower. The sun is brighter and hotter; the wind, when it blows, blows stronger, and storms last longer. The trees are shorter and firmer, and like in Rómenna, there is sand even in places where sand should never go. Food, for example. Unlike in Rómenna, it is fine as dust, and gray-yellow in colour, and in the space where the sea relentlessly reaches over the beach it turns brown, not glassy. Unlike in Rómenna, there are no white sea-lilies, too rare and treasured to pick; there are no herb-bushes to englentle it with green and lilac and red. The grass grows tall but coarse, uncomfortable to walk on almost to the point of pain. Plants are a wild sort of green, with leaves both wide and sharp, biting into her sight like nature is snapping its jaws in her face, challenging her to contest its rule. Colours are both more muted and more vibrant, a smaller variety but each shade somehow deeper. The sea, spread over a shallow end for miles beforew the coast, is greener in colour also, and even where it veers into darker hues it is closer to dark aquamarine than Númenor’s bottomless sky-night blue.

This, then, is a land untouched by the Valar’s tempering influence.

Umbar is a land of steep, twisting hills, and mountains and mines. Umbar looks like it should be a land of harsh men, and yet, she sees, its people are merry, at least when the Adûnaim do not beat them into the ground. Umbar suffers under the lash of the Western Men and yet it is lively, rebellion always seething under its skin. Umbar is a land of many hardships, and yet there is a strange peace to its silent permanent summer; or there would be, if not for the screams that break the silence. Umbar does not love its oppressors, neither their ailing king nor their soon-to-be queen.

Umbar is lonely.

In Umbar, Vanimeldë’s mind clears.

She spends hours sitting in the sand in light summer linens, watching the waves lick at the sand and break on the rocks that line the cove, and days wandering along the shore and through the hills. They live secluded from the rest of the country, in a house that overlooks a small bay, none but she and Aglarân and Elcalan and guards all around—because Umbar is dangerous and in Umbar they are not loved; but they keep away. There is silence there; there is peace. Little by little, her numbness bleeds away, worn away by the waves and the wind and the sand and the silence, but in Umbar she can be alone when she wants to be; she can drown her sorrows in the sea, and in the violently salty water her eyes water whether she weeps or not .

They are each alone, at first, and speak little. Vanimeldë swims herself to exhaustion, and Aglarân walks and walks as though he can outrun his grief. Elcalan—Elcalan wakes in the night screaming, and when Vanimeldë rushes to his room Aglarân is already there, without fault, kneeling by his son’s bedside as the child shakes in his arms. Vanimeldë watches from the doorway and does not sleep for the rest of the night. But overtime, even as Elcalan’s nightmares fade, she wakes during the night without reason, dread pressing against the back of her throat, the irrational and irrepressible fear that something terrible happened again. Then she rises and walks through the silent house to the room Aglarân and Elcalan share, and stands there until, in the quiet, she can hear the steady rise and fall of their breathing, and be reassured that they are alive.

It takes them longer than it should to reach out; but slowly they start filling the silence and bridging the distance. There is always an empty space where Azruzâir used to be, and often they find themselves waiting for her reply, only to stop speaking altogether when they realize it will never come again; but this time it is an emptiness where someone used to be, and not someone left alone in the middle of a void.

In Umbar, Vanimeldë has time to think. And then when her thoughts burn her she has time to let the wound heal and the iron cool before she uses it to stab someone else.

“It was my fault,” she tells Aglarân one day, as they sit under the stars with the child asleep between them. Her son looks down from the sky and frowns at her in question.

“It’s my fault Azruzâir is dead.”

“No,” Aglarân says. His voice is quiet. “You did not put the poison in that wine.”

“I didn’t,” Vanimeldë agrees. “Herucalmo did.”

He turns sharply. Vanimeldë holds up a hand before he can speak. “Before you decided to leave,” she begins, “we had an argument.”

“Mother, you had arguments all the time.”

“It was different,” she says. “I didn’t even realize it was an argument. I let slip something I was thinking about—”

“Something worth _killing_ you over?”

“Yes,” Vanimeldë whispers. The project of a lifetime, for when she takes the Sceptre. A reform of how all Númenor works, to allow the Crown greater control over the nobles, over the country’s furthest reaches, over everything. Herucalmo is her consort now, but he is a lord of Emerië first and foremost, and the idea could not have pleased him—would have worried him enough, considered also their disagreements, and his position, and the way it could benefit him, to justify such an action. Vanimeldë means to do such a thing when she is Queen: very well, she cannot be allowed to become Queen. It is even logical, truly. It makes a scary kind of sense. She might have done the same, were their positions inverted.

That does not make her any less furious. That does not for a moment justify him.

“Yes. Trust me. It’s something worth killing over.”

“But,” Aglarân says, “your death would make me the King’s heir, not him. I’m well past my majority.”

“And did he not send you away to Middle-Earth?”

Aglarân opens his mouth to protest and then closes it again. After a pause, he says, “So you believe he arranged for me and Azruzâir and Elcalan to leave, and then for you to be assassinated while we were away—no. No, I cannot believe it.”

“Who else would try to kill me?”

“You have enemies, _ammê_.”

She has enemies, certainly. One of them sleeps in her bed. She rephrases the question. “Who else would try to kill me and have a prayer of success?”

Aglarân shakes his head. “But he loves you.”

“Perhaps. Others have sacrificed their love when they thought it would benefit them. And it is all too carefully arranged… did he know your departure was hindered?”

“I told him when we came back to the palace.”

Vanimeldë nods. “And had it not been delayed, you would have been long gone, on the way to Middle-Earth. And I would have been gone, as well… you are my heir, but I assume he would not have sent word, or at least not at once. Let them stay in Middle-Earth, he would have said; let them enjoy it while they can. It isn’t safe, besides, not until the assassin is caught. Without me, without you, he would have had control of the Council. He is the second most influential member, after all.” She breathes out a laugh. “Well. The most influential, by now, I’d expect.”

“The King—”

“Then King is ailing and weak,” she interrupts him. “He is in no state to rule. If we do not find him dead when we return, I shall be surprised.”

Aglarân looks at her as though at a stranger, and only then does she realize how bitter her words must sound. He still does not believe her; he cannot think his father capable of such an action. 

Still there is something of wariness behind his eyes. Vanimeldë smiles to see it: a seed is all she needs to plant, and it will grow and thrive on whatever happens next.

What happens next is that they stay in Umbar for years. They stay until Elcalan is no longer a child but not yet a man, they stay until the captain of the ship that brought them seeks her out, white-faced, to show her a letter from his wife.

 _—more than ever before even since the King died_ , one passage laments. Vanimeldë stands tall and proud as a Queen should and thanks him and bids him rise when he kneels to her. Then she leaves to find her family. They set sail for Númenor the same day.

She can guess what happened. Whether it was Herucalmo that killed her father or his age, it was a few years ago at least. He neglected to write her. Not only that: he forbade anyone to write her, either, or mention it in any letter outward-bound, and they have to thank the slip of a mariner’s wife that they know at all.

She should have gone back earlier.

She should have gone back at once, as soon as she knew.

 _I am going back_ now, she swears angrily, _and I will take back whatever he’s managed to steal from me._

But power, once lost, is surprisingly difficult to recover.

They do not send word ahead, and so Herucalmo does not come to greet her at the harbour. He would not have, even if he’d known of her coming: but that is the excuse he’ll use, if he even bothers with excuses anymore. But at the docks there are people, nonetheless, and when Vanimeldë steps down from the ship they see her.

 _The Queen_ , they whisper, _the Queen!_ they shout, _Queen Vanimeldë! Queen Vanimeldë!_

And among those who bow and kneel and call to her there are those who turn and hurry away, so when they reach Armenelos at the city’s gates they find Herucalmo waiting.

He’s wearing a crown. That’s the first thing she notices: the circlet on his forehead and the white jewel shining from its centre. 

A regent does not wear a crown.

Still, he kneels. He takes her hand and kisses her knuckles, and it takes every shred of will she has not to jerk away.

Vanimeldë lays a hand on his shoulder, and with the other she lifts the crown off his bowed head to place it on her own. It is not a proper coronation, but a cheer rises from the people gathered around them, and Vanimeldë smiles and holds out a hand to help Herucalmo to his feet.

The gesture is intentionally condescending, and yet he can do nothing but take it.

That is her last triumph for a long while.

The Council changed while she was gone. She should have foreseen this; she didn’t. All the faces unfamiliar to her are also hostile, and their hostility is not much veiled; few of the ones she remembers look any kinder. 

Her father’s seat, in particular, is empty. Even as her heart clenches painfully— _damn him; damn him, she could not even say goodbye_ —Vanimeldë hastens to it before Herucalmo can even _think_ of denying her this, and from the head of the table she surveys the room. She quickly notices a pattern among the missing councillors. Gone is Uriphêr, who supported her when she tried to implement Nimruphêr’s plan for schooling; gone are Aglahad and Gimlinzil and Niluphêl who argued to reduce military presence in Umbar, and gone too is Lindir, who always disagreed with Herucalmo and wasn’t afraid of saying so. And gone also are her father’s most devoted, Nimloth and Araval and Eressai.

_Oh, Herucalmo._

Oh, you know what you’re doing.

Vanimeldë folds her hands on the table. “Shall we begin?” she asks, and none of her rising desperation makes its way into her voice.

But they don’t need to hear hopelessness from her when they can see it in themselves.

A few years pass, years during which Vanimeldë is forced to watch her husband progressively take everything she ever worked for from her without being able to intervene—because he’s already taken too much for her to have any power to stop it—before anything significant happens.

Some of the councillors die. Two in a shipwreck, one stabbed in his sleep by his wife, three more of old age, conveniently all close together; another one is incriminated for corruption and extortion, and Vanimeldë makes sure she is found guilty, condemned to sixty years—she knows full well the woman has fourty left at most.

The void left in the council gives her an opening.

Councillors are appointed directly by King or Queen. Vanimeldë is meticulous about it; seven people are few to rest all one’s hopes on, and she must make sure to choose well. She makes lists and makes choices and sends beautifully worded letters.

They decline.

Herucalmo, she realizes immediately, must have threatened them, or paid them, or otherwise silenced them—one at least of all the people she tries goes missing. He gives her a few days to let her anger dissipate and leave place to despair; then he presents her with his own candidates.

They’re all terrible choices, but all she can do is choose the most moderate and hope to sway them to her side.

He doesn’t let her _speak_.

In council, he doesn’t leave her time to present her case, or argue another’s, and least of all oppose him. When she tries to speak over him he speaks over her in turn. She could confront him directly, demand his silence as his Queen, but the risk he’ll defy her openly is too great, and she can’t afford such an evident show of weakness. He knows it. Herucalmo spent decades measuring himself against her, he knows the power of her voice; now he makes sure it is never heard.

Once they called her the hidden king, when it was all but official that she ruled in her father’s stead; now they call her the silent queen.

For a while she resists, hoping for improvement, but eventually even she can see that if anything’s changing it’s for the worse.

“I give up,” Vanimeldë says. “You’ve won.”

She spent hours agonizing over the phrasing. He’ll never believe me, she thought at first; he’ll never fall for it. Unless he thinks I’m doing it with second ends, but then he’d think I’d know he’d realize that…

She gets lost quickly in that thought and decides to balance her hopes on the chance that he will, too, that he’ll consider it too improbable and convoluted a strategy for her to have adopted it.

“I don’t believe you,” he says immediately. This she expected—though she did not think he would be so blunt. That he does not play around it is further proof of how unthreatening he finds her, and why shouldn’t he? He’s secure in his power. She would consider it insulting if it did not play in her favour so heavily.

He wearies of word games? Very well. She can play at exhaustion too. “I’m tired, Herucalmo,” she says, closing her eyes. “I’m tired of fighting.”

“Liar.”

“Fine. I’m not tired of fighting. I’m tired of fighting and never obtaining _anything_. I’m tired of the pointlessness of it all.”

He shakes his head again, but it’s already growing less certain. She can see it in his eyes. What she’s saying is logical; and Vanimeldë is nothing if not logical. Their positions have never been inverted like this, and he has no precedent to go on, nothing to tell him how she is likely to act except the way she acted in completely different situations. Vanimeldë acts logically.

Vanimeldë does not give up power, though.

Maybe if he’d known her when her grandfather was king.

As it is, it takes less than she expected to convince him. “You can keep the council,” she tells him. “You can have it. But leave me the court. I will not attempt to speak against you in council, but do not silence me again in court.”

Vanimeldë has never cared for court when she could have more, but now that she can’t have anything else she’ll prefer it to nothing. But Herucalmo does not care for it, either, and so it is easy for him to grant.

_If I cannot whisper to the council I’ll shout to the people, and hope my enemies have buried themselves so far underground that not even the echoes of what I say reaches them. But never again will I be called silent._

No; they call her the Singer Queen, the Dancing Queen. 

It is not unintentional.

Nimruphêr is gone and Azruzâir is gone and the last thing Aglarân, still grieving his wife, needs is for her to confirm to him how powerless she is against the man who killed her, and as for Elcalan, he is so very young and more inclined to military sport than political games.

It means Vanimeldë, pushes back into a state of impotence she hasn’t known since she was little more than a child, has no one to vent her frustration to.

Her rooms are untouched when she comes back from Umbar, her mother’s diaries—Vanimeldë counts them among her greatest treasures and keeps them with almost obsessive care, though she knows them almost by heart—still on their shelves, her music lying where she left it, her harp in its case. In the first drawer of her desk is the letter-paper she used to fill sheets upon sheets of, to send north. 

Her hands, brushing along the wood, pause on its handle.

She has no one to talk to, so why not?

The paper is old and stiff at the edges, but still folds easily without cracking. Vanimeldë writes, and writes, and writes. She writes letters; she writes journal entries; she writes in the style of articles and essays and dissertations; she writes music, though she uses note-paper for that. When Herucalmo inevitably overrules her in council, she writes; she writes through her frustration and lets the words carry her past it.

The first songs she writes are too dark and angry to serve her; and the next too obvious. Slowly she improves. She writes ballads to lost love and love turned sour, lyrical poetry about longing and loss and how it turns back against you—how it can be turned against you—and she writes merrier songs too, paeans to life and the turning of season and the joy of work one loves. She writes them in Quenya and Sindarin for the court to sigh and marvel and dance to, and she writes other songs, too, in Adûnaic, to the melody of the Noldolantë, songs lamenting days long past and offering hopes for the future, conspicuously leaving the present void.

The court which she despised is her trying ground. She sings her songs and watches courtiers grow to love and admire her, speaks kind words and offers smiles and reaps ten times as many smiles in return.

One advantage to not being the one who makes decisions—and everyone knowing it—is that none of the discontent falls on her shoulders. There is disquiet in Umbar and Herucalmo raises taxes in Anadûnê to strengthen control; there are protests in the streets of the cities of Anadûnê, discontented subjects on the brink of revolt, and Herucalmo represses them, pushing them ever closer to it. All of these are decisions Vanimeldë herself would have had to make, but while it’s someone else making them, she can condemn them. None of that discontent falls on her shoulders if she makes it clear that she is powerless to intervene. Which she does; and as she draws hopeful, loving eyes every time she steps into the court’s sight, she watches those same eyes turns dark gazes upon her husband as he passes.

But the court is one thing, and while it is certainly a powerful part, it is nonetheless only a _part_ of Anadûnê.

Soon Vanimeldë makes plans to travel.

The day before she leaves she returns to her rooms exhausted and aching and half-mute from singing and laughing and simply _talking_ to find Herucalmo waiting for her.

He’s in her study. She walks in without looking; when she sees him she takes a startled step back, and her elbow knocks into the doorway. Herucalmo looks up. He’s leaning against the windowsill, his arms crossed, a book in his hand, and the setting sunlight filters around him and gilds the edges of his silhouette and the corners of the book, casting him in shadow.

When he lowers it to look at her she realizes with a sick lurch just what book he was reading. 

There is an empty space on the shelf where her mother’s diaries stand. When Vanimeldë crosses the room to reach him, Herucalmo turns around the table in the opposite direction—the book still in his hands—as though they’re playing a sick game of catch.

Vanimeldë stills, stops, turns to look out the window. From Armenelos one can’t see the sea to the west; the sun sets over the mountains of the Andustar. But she can imagine it. Fire on the waves, red and blue, and all the sky aflame; and when the sea has swallowed the sun the sky will pale to rose and indigo and pearl grey, losing colour, until finally what is left of blue turns to black and the stars shine clear.

Against the black outline of the trees the sky is already fading.

She turns back to face Herucalmo. “Why are you here?” she asks.

“Good evening to you,” he says, a thread of sarcasm in his voice. “My Queen. To whom do you write these books?”

So he hasn’t realized—Vanimeldë exhales. “I did not write them,” she says, and holds out a hand to demand the book back. He sets it on the table between them, and she manages to keep from reaching for it.

“You’ve done remarkably in court. All the courtiers adore you now.”

“Did they dislike me before? I hadn’t noticed.” She curses internally. She thought he wasn’t paying attention.

“Neither had I. But you’re the talk of the court,” he repeats.

“I’ve always been the talk of the court. Why are you here?”

His gaze is unreadable. It scares her. “They’re getting loud.”

Vanimeldë laughs. “Oh, I see. I see. I must be silent, but when I will not, then people around me must be made quiet instead. Well, so the courtiers are loud. Would you rather they whispered?”

His eyes flash. “Whispers are but air.”

“Ah, that’s what Finwë said, but they were Morgoth’s lies.”

“What are you playing at, Vanimeldë?”

“I’m not playing.” She smiles at him bitterly. “You do not allow me to play. So instead I sing.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you did not sing quite so much,” he says.

She rounds on him. She should not; but his intrusion is making her angry, reckless, careless. “Do you forbid it? With what authority? I am your _wife_ ,” she says, “ _and_ your Queen, and not your servant, and _beyond your bounds I will go as seems good to me_.”

He looks disconcerted for half a second, and then smiles in his conciliatory manner. “Not at all, not at all,” he says. “I simply worry about you. I fear you might lose your voice.”

It shocks her into silence.

A threat. An outright threat. He tried to kill her once before. Why does it surprise her so that he would threaten her?

Perhaps it surprises her that he would stoop so low. Perhaps it is because he never admitted it, though she’s sure he knows she knows.

He knows her well.

Vanimeldë recomposes her expression into a smile. “How kind,” she says. “Do not fear, my voice is well trained.” She circles the table, keeping between Herucalmo and her books, and takes his arm, and leads him out. “Though of course if the noise disturbs you we may talk about it again.”

They’re at the door.

She opens it.

Herucalmo glances at it, at her expectant look, and calculated amusement colours his expression, though she still catches the bemusement underneath. He bows his head and wishes her good night. Vanimeldë waits until he turns the corner before slamming the door closed and leaning against it.

She leaves tomorrow and she can’t take her things with her. Foolish, foolish, foolish. Did she not think he would intrude on her chambers? Now suddenly everywhere she looks is veiled by doubt. This time it was her mother’s diaries. And next time? What next? Her own writing? Herucalmo cares nothing for music, but her letters, her—?

He would have killed her for the suspicion of a possibility that would harm him and if he finds certainty that she is trying to harm him—

Well he will certainly find that if he looks.

Aglarân…? No, she is quite sure Herucalmo watches all that passes between them. And Elcalan is away, on a voyage to Middle-Earth, and would she trust him with it, anyway?

Would she trust…

Abruptly she pushes herself back upright and retrieves her mother’s diaries from the study, her own writings from her desk and the floor and the various places she left them. She only keeps the music; all else she gathers together and presses into her mother’s old coffer—the one Vanimeldë received her journals in. It fits, barely. Then she writes a quick message, messily, in the near-darkness, drops it into an envelope, and when her maid arrives—one of the few she trusts, partly because she’s been in service at the palace for decades and partly because of the silver Vanimeldë slips her often—hands everything to her with an address and a demand of urgency.

The next day she leaves her rooms in her customary half-mess, but empty of all things significant: a void in her bookcase in place of her mother’s diaries, the drawers of her desk empty, her harp travelling with her.

Vanimeldë knows she can’t start a revolution. 

Vanimeldë isn’t trying to start a revolution: revolutions are messy and violent and Anadûnê, supposedly, is a land of peace and order—though no one believes that any longer, not with the previous rulers’ fighting and battles and assassinations, not with Elcalan’s wars of expansion in Middle-Earth. No, Vanimeldë will not try to start a revolution because she does not want to plunge the country into years of civil war, because she might fail, because she might win but would still lose, because either way there would be too much death and, after all, Herucalmo isn’t as bad as to warrant _that_.

She just wants some more… influence.

It worked with the court; it should work with the country as well. Vanimeldë travels with the bare minimum of an escort—two guards, a maid, but only a single guard when she can—and sings and talks and smiles and lets people confide in her and makes promises (only ones she knows she can probably maintain, though not out of a sense of honour or honesty; because she needs them to believe in her, and therefore she needs them to believe her) and she makes herself admired and loved and subtly pitied at the same time.

The people love her, their merry dancing queen, so kind to them. And Herucalmo, effectively ruling, enforcing all those unpopular policies, they dislike. Vanimeldë works their dislike to the point that it teeters on the line that separates it from hate, ready to tip over at the slightest push, word, whisper.

She does not give the last blow.

She does not want a revolution.

Once she ruled from behind the throne and everyone knew it; when she could finally sit on the throne and hold the sceptre and wear the crown she could not rule and everyone knew it; now she has a new kind of power, and with it comes a new kind of leverage.

She'll just have to make sure everyone knows it.

It takes her years, decades, in which she goes back to Armenelos rarely, if ever, and then it is to remind the court of her existence, because for Herucalmo and the council she might as well not exist at all. Still, when she is present she sits at the head of the table and gives her assent to all that is decided and clenches her teeth through discussions she is strictly excluded from.

Then when she is done—nay, she will never be done; but when she has love enough, influence enough—she speaks. She chooses the subject carefully, and of course it’s the most contentious, and the easiest. Taxes. One of the councillors—she doesn’t even know his name—proposes an increase in taxation on commercial trade in Rómenna. Vanimeldë opposes it, and strongly. It’s not hard: Herucalmo favours the agricultural sectors heavily, and it would be easy to relieve the much-vexed maritime trade if they’d counterbalance it by shifting the load slightly on great plantations like, say, Emerië. But great plantations are owned by ancient nobiliar houses, and they’re all too happy to pay as little as they can and burden the rising middle-class and the commoners alike with the country’s expenses.

Of course, this only favours her further. Vanimeldë makes the suggestion. It is rejected, and she acquiesces to the will of the councillors as she should; but already the proposal itself shouldn’t have been made, and it gets ever harder to avoid speaking to Herucalmo and then evade his questions as she waits.

She does not have to wait long. Word spreads quickly that Tar-Vanimeldë’s decision was repressed by the council and indignation flares up. When the subject of the dispute is made known, it only serves to inflame matters further.

She planned it that way.

Herucalmo sees it, of course. But Herucalmo also sees that she has influence now: that her decisions have results, very tangible ones, ones that look like broken windows and maimed statues and strikes of ship crews and merchants alike. He sees that it was a mistake to leave her the court, to let her travel and so leave her all the country while he turned his back to it, bent over a council table. Herucalmo sees it all: and yet it is late and he cannot undo it. Vanimeldë can’t start a revolution, but with her country chanting her name, she can threaten to.

As a lie it’s surprisingly effective, especially when spun by her clever voice; as a lie she can cut out everything she doesn’t want of a revolution, every death and tragedy and complication, and paint the world in glorious red, and weave a tapestry of splendour and horror for Herucalmo to recoil from.

Vanimeldë can’t start a revolution.

But Vanimeldë doesn’t need to start a revolution. She only needs him to believe she can.

The decision is reversed and the protests cease. 

Beyond those first incautious letters, now hidden safely, Vanimeldë does not write, for paper is fragile and easily destroyable and yet too firm and undeniable a proof against her. But all the stories of her deeds she works into songs to be sung—though much disguised—and she whispers advice and warning to her son, so when she dies, he’ll be prepared.

It’s not perfect. Far from it: she has less power now, she reckons, than when her grandfather was king. Or perhaps not. She has the power to enforce any decision she and her people agree on; and though she could convince the people to agree with her, in the long run it would not prove effective. She has to balance her power with her image, and she has a very particular image to maintain: she travels often, and whenever she’s away Herucalmo is left in control, with all that entails. But when she is in Armenelos, things often go her way.

It’s far from perfect and it’s nothing like what she dreamed when she was young and thought she was the wind and others the trees, but, she thinks, it’s enough.

Vanimeldë didn’t want a revolution, but she prepared her people for one; and when she dies anything that kept them from it falls, plunging them into civil war.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Ammê_ is Adûnaic for "mother".  
> Vanimeldë's angry careless retort to Herucalmo is a slight misquotation Aredhel's words to Turgon ("I am your sister and not your servant, and beyond your bounds I will go as seems good to me"), but the changes are intentional, of course. ("Bounds" intended as "orders".)
> 
> The parallelism between nobles/middle class and land possession/commercial trade also goes back to Ancient Rome (and Ancient Greece before it). People who tried to do reforms regarding it have been assassinated, declared public enemies, and driven to suicide.  
> Vanimeldë's attempt to accentrate power in her own hands has a long real-world history, as does the nobles' (understandable) opposition. Generally speaking whatever party is trying to gain more power against the other seeks the support of the rest of the (non-noble) population by handing out favours and benefits, which is always good.  
> 


	4. Lómiel

When she first meets Azruzâir they are neither of them children any longer. It happens entirely by accident. There is a crowd gathered in the courtyard of the University, listening to a heated debate; it is the Royal University of Armenelos, so the eavesdroppers are subtle, scattered in small groups and all apparently engaged in some other activity; it is the Royal University of Armenelos, so “heated debate” means “screaming match”.

Lómiel subtly approaches to eavesdrop, of course.

The screamers— _debaters_ —are a professor and a girl. The girl is tall and her silver braids whip around her shoulders when she angrily turns to leave, still shouting about _dubious historical accuracy_ and _damned bias against anything not complying with his view of the world and the Valar_ and _ignoring every other account of the First Age on the basis that they’re not Pengolodh’s is_ —and then she turns a corner and the professor’s angry retort covers her voice.

And that is the first Lómiel sees of Royal Princess Azruzâir, daughter of prince Lengweär and his wife Nimruphêr Eledhwen, protegée of Vanimeldë the King’s Heir, her cousin.

Lómiel too studies history, and despite her mother’s misgivings they grow close. Falmalótë, born Rôthinzil, fought with her sister long before Lómiel’s birth, and never told her children the reason of the argument; only that it happened, and that is why they are not often at court, though they have relatives in high places. It might be the reason Lómiel’s blooming friendship with her cousin worries her so; of course, the reason might be another, but that would imply an absence of trust in her and Lómiel does not like to think of it.

That Nimruphêr is not the real reason Falmalótë does not like the court.

Falmalótë was not born noble. Her parents were sailors under the late queen Eäriel’s cousin Niluzîr; when they died Niluzîr fostered their daughters as his own, forged a blood relation with them, and introduced them to court as his own relatives. It should never have been important; their ancestry would have been uninteresting enough to pass unquestioned, a simple ruse to provide the girls with a better future. But then Falmalótë caught the eye of young Rúnyo, of the line of Elros, and suddenly their story risked being revealed, and they cast out in disgrace. Nimruphêr, Lómiel gleaned, high in the favour of both princess and prince, seeking admission to the Academy, was nervous. But not so nervous as Falmalótë herself would become.

When her mother told them the story, sitting at the foot of their bed with her hair unbound, Lómiel’s father standing beside her with an arm around her shoulders, Lómiel listened in rapt attention, gripping her brother’s hand so hard Voronwë gasped. It sounded like the romances and tales of fortune she so loved, her mother the victim of tragedy with a dark secret carried to happiness by fortuite chance, her father the young nobleman seeking her hand against the will of all the world. She’d sworn silence on it, this terrible story that could mean her family’s ruin, though she did not understand it then; and now that she does she thinks it is not at all so great a matter as her mother makes it out to be. Still her mother has nothing to fear; she’d never tell a soul of her origins, if only because not a soul would care to ask. 

Therefore she feels it is her right to disregard her mother’s fears about Azruzâir. She could cite precedents in ancient lore for people who maintained their friendship despite their parents’ enmity and all the ways the world benefited from it, but she does not think the situation is comparable, and either way her mother does not care for ancient lore.

When she meets Azruzâir they are neither of them children, and yet they grow close as though childhood friends. Azruzâir’s studies focus on the First Age and all its many disasters; Lómiel prefers modern history. But their opinions are remarkably similar, and that brings them closer together than a shared childhood could.

Azruzâir lives in the palace. Therefore, Lómiel is invited often. The University, though not properly on palace grounds, is nonetheless close enough that it is often easier for them to move directly there than to go back to Lómiel’s own house. They spend entire days in the gardens, walking and sitting and lying on the ground, debating this or that controversial argument that it would not be proper to bring up in class. Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that Lómiel meets Vanimeldë.

That’s the way she phrases it to her siblings. Lómiel, the eldest, was born late in her parents’ marriage, and Voronwë much later, and Silmiel much later still: there are many years between them. Silmiel could be her own daughter; Azruzâir’s son is born only a few years after her. 

Silmiel is fascinated by all things courtly, and loves to hear Lómiel speak of them. Lómiel on her part likes to recall them, especially after Azruzâir dies and she sees little more of it. The Queen—she says to Silmiel—though she was not yet Queen then, only her father’s Heir, was very beautiful, with Elros Tar-Minyatur’s silver hair. Yes, the same as Father’s. You should be proud of your own dark hair, not complain! Do you not want to be beautiful like Mother when you grow up? Well, you look just like her, and silver wouldn’t suit you. Will you let me finish the tale now? I was saying, the Queen is very beautiful, silver-haired and tall. Not as tall as an elf, for sure, but very tall. She’s skilled in singing and dancing and speaking—no, I’ve never seen her dance, myself, but I’ve heard her speak! Her voice is like a song, even when she argues. And when she sings! Well, the Elves of old cannot have had a lovelier voice. No, not Maglor, and not Daeron, though he was the best. Shall I tell you his tale again? But beware, it is a dark one…

If there is something she has inherited from her mother, it is her shyness; so while she might argue with her peers and scream at her brother when he tears her books she’s quiet with the professors, and when her writing earns her a place at the University she keeps it with care. She is not one to seek trouble.

So when she receives an unmarked coffer from a dark-cloaked messenger who hurries away into the shadows and opens it to find a scrawled message from the Queen, she is beyond surprised.

Her surprise turns to equal parts elation and dread when she discovers what’s inside the coffer, though that’s only much later.

After Tar-Vanimeldë dies, Anadûnê is left in an uproar. Her husband Herucalmo crowns himself Tar-Anducal, and outrage sweeps through the nation: how dare he! After what he did to his wife—now _this_?

On her part, Lómiel reasons Vanimeldë will not be wanting her coffer back, and resolves to finally see what’s inside.

The message was sent in haste, and inside there was a plea for help, to simply keep it hidden and safe until she came to ask for it back. Lómiel is curious; but Lómiel is also patient, and loyal, and she she burned the message, hid the box, and never opened it, though it was unlocked.

Now she does. She drags it out of the wall-niche she’d concealed it in and spends the night reading through it. At first she’s puzzled—things seem to have been thrown into it at random; it was clearly done in more haste than she realized at first—but once she’s managed to make some order in the scattered fragments, it becomes more readable.

It is composed of sheafs of paper-sheets and some bound books. The books do not seem to have been written by Vanimeldë, but rather for her.

 _Mother_ , she asks Falmalótë when she sees her next, _who was Eäriel?_

Eäriel, she finds out, was the late Queen’s own mother, the first wife of Tar-Telemmaitë. She suffered from an incurable disease, but Telemmaitë, madly in love, married her anyway; and they say his daughter by her was his greatest treasure, and he denied her nothing. _Of course they also say she was his only child_ , her mother adds in a lower tone, but even Lómiel’s heard that particular piece of gossip before.

The rest is in Tar-Vanimeldë’s own hand, and it outlines something—someone—darker than Lómiel though she knew.

It’s a goldmine. No. It’s a Silmaril. 

And on the throne are the sons of Fëanor, who would kill her if ever they knew what she hoardeth.

Lómiel cannot bring herself to burn it. _Direct testimonies_ , the historian in her screams. _Wanton destruction of history, it would be, you can’t do this, you can’t do this, this is priceless treasure, this is a dream, this is the work of a lifetime_.

In the end it does not depend on her.

There is a fire in Armenelos. No one knows who starts it—it is easy enough to blame anyone at all in the air of conflict that chokes Tar-Anducal’s rule, where his loyalists and Tar-Alcarin’s (as they call him) assault each other in the street even as the men they support maintain a pretense of detachment—but it spreads quickly, and in one night half the high quarter is lost to the flames.

Including Lómiel’s house.

With everything she received from Vanimeldë.

The problem is this: all her sources are gone. Even if Tar-Anducal dies within her lifespan, even if Tar-Alcarin consents to the publishing of his mother’s biography—which Lómiel had more than enough material to write—now it is based on nothing; she has some notes, some handwritten copies of Vanimeldë’s letters, but they’re in her handwriting and they might as well be inventions of hers. Which is what they’d be taken of. And without sources she cannot write a history, because they’re no longer in the First Age when anyone could call themselves a historian and get away with grievous misrepresentation of half the major political figures of their time simply because they’re nearly the only source on it. No: now there will be other sources, which will claim that Vanimeldë was nothing more than she appeared: the Singer Queen, beloved of all as her name says, who intervened in her husband’s rule _maybe_ once but that too is disputed.

The best she can do now is write a novel, she thinks grimly, and then she will certainly not publish it.

She does write a novel.

No: she writes a biography and calls it simply _Vanimeldë_ , so that it sounds like a novel. If it were a known work it would be incredibly rare, as the only existing copy is her manuscript; but the world will never know it, at least not for many generations.

She cannot let it die with her, though.

“Love,” she says to her grand-nephew, Voronwë’s grandson, when he is thirteen years old and in the age she deems him most likely to start disobeying his parents but still listen to her. “I have a gift for you, but only if you can keep it a secret.”

Wide-eyed, the boy nods.

Lómiel, her hair long gone white, her hands trembling as she holds out the book to him, thinks: this is not what I wanted, but it is enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh, finding keepeth or afar casteth a Silmaril" is eligible for revenge from the sons of Fëanor, that's what historian Lómiel Runiel is referencing there, because if you spend enough time thinking about any work of literature be it history or fiction it starts living in your head and you start making literary references even to yourself. I can testify.
> 
> Lómiel means twilight-daughter, Silmiel starlight-daughter, Voronwë steadfastness (it's also a reference to Falmalótë's own father). While Nimruphêr always favoured her native Adûnaic, her sister tried to adapt to the rest of the nobility and named all her children in Quenya, abandoning her own Adûnaic name.
> 
> I am not ordinarily so infuriating about historical references, but the roman republic _does_ live in my head rent-free right now. so have a reference to Caesar's loyalists, headed by Clodius vs. the _optimates_ ' Milo, who were basically tearing half of Rome down in their own private civil war on the streets.


End file.
